She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Governmentin 2004 from Wesleyan University. From there, she spent three years bouncing around various jobs—child care in an after-school program; part-time software QA in the bioinformatics industry; sales support for the Onion—before realizing that software engineering would be a much better career fit. She returned to school to attend NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where she earned a Master of Science in Computer Science in 2010. She spent four years as a Software Engineer at Google before joining Indiegogo. In her spare time, Amanda mentors others in their career transitions at Hackbright Academy.