Silver ’04 works as a product manager at Google and her current role has her managing a team that is responsible for the login process. “Essentially, any time you, as a user, logs into Google, across any product, I manage a team that makes that login process work,” said Silver, who is based out of Seattle.

“Basically, signing into a service is proving who you are to that service,” Silver said. “And it feels super simple from a user's perspective - you have a username and a password and you just want to get into your stuff. But there's this really intimate tension that a service provider has to balance - how do we make it easy enough for you, the legitimate user, to get in, but also make it hard enough, and safe enough, such that the illegitimate user doesn't get in.”

The tension eased some with the creation of more convenient options than remembering usernames and passwords - fingerprint or facial recognition, passkeys, etc. And while that has made it easier for the user, it’s come at the same time when everyone is balancing more and more devices and accounts.

“Today, people are managing this complicated web of devices with multiple accounts each with different ways of logging in. You no longer just have a computer with one account and associated username and password; you have a computer, a phone, a watch, a TV, multiple shared devices with a bunch of  different accounts, etc. And a service has to make sure you – and only you – can log in and stay logged in, from any of your devices. So the space has become really complicated and very interesting in order to enable the right users to easily get in, safely stay logged in, while blocking all the illegitimate users out there. It's a lot of onion layers to peel back.”

It’s okay if Silver’s idea of fun doesn’t match your own. Most of us don’t have a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in biomechanical engineering, and a master’s degree, also from Stanford, in mechanical engineering. From Silver’s perspective, Stanford “teaches the thought process behind engineering - identifying and then solving hard problems - rather than only  hard facts of engineering.” She didn’t start an engineering job after she graduated; instead she used that thought process education to move into design consulting where she focused on identifying and solving problems for people using technology. 

A few years after finishing her education, Silver went to work at frog as a design researcher and then spent several years at Google working in the user experience space. From there she spent a little more than two years at Microsoft before returning to Google, where she transitioned from user experience to product management. 

Despite all her success, Silver very cheekily jokes that she is the black sheep of the family because everyone has more degrees than her. Her brother (featured in the Spring 2023 edition of the St. Andrew’s magazine) has a doctorate and both her parents have medical degrees.

That desire to always keep learning is one reason Silver stayed at St. Andrew’s from Middle School through graduation. She considered leaving, even applying out twice, only to decide to remain.

“The teachers knew who I was and supported me very intimately,” Silver said. “Moving to a new school, I may or may not have found that, but I certainly wouldn't have had the continual support from Middle School into (the Upper School) to graduation. That was really, really critical because my teachers knew how to challenge me. The other piece was that St Andrews allowed me to do a lot of different things – to really explore different subjects and play multiple sports. I knew I wouldn't have had that opportunity, had I gone to (a different school), which would have required me to specialize and to give my all to academics or focus on one sport. I'm not sure I recognized that at the time, but looking back, it's one of the things I most appreciate from my time at St. Andrew’s. Having the opportunity and the bandwidth to explore a bunch of different things, to figure out what I really love to do, where I really wanted to lean in.”