Marianna Budnikova ’13, ’14

Senior Android Software Engineer, Dropbox Inc.

College of Engineering

Marianna Budnikova is passionate about her work in the tech field, serving as a senior android software engineer on the HelloSign Mobile team at Dropbox. The dual degree College of Engineering (Computer Science) graduate also supports women in the tech industry. She is dedicated to growing the diverse pipeline in the tech field and inspiring women to pursue STEM careers. 

While at Boise State, she co-founded the Boise State chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery Women, co-founded and acted as president of Girl Develop It Boise, and served on the Board of Directors of WiSTEM, a non-profit that supports STEM education for girls in Idaho. In 2016 Budnikova gave a TEDx Boise talk about how to empower women and girls to pursue careers in tech. An immigrant, she understands the value of financial support to international students and how it helps students achieve their American dream. She and her husband Allen Benz, also a Boise State alum, founded the Margaret Hamilton Scholarship for Women in Computer Science at Boise State and have contributed to it since 2015. 

Budnikova has given multiple talks, and written several Dropbox blog posts on using analytics to enhance user and developer experience. Before working for Dropbox, she used data science and machine learning techniques to answer complex questions about augmented and virtual reality user engagement and sentiment for the Microsoft HoloLens team.