Courtney Kennedy

Courtney Kennedy graduated from College of the Holy Cross with a B.A. in Physics in 1991. In the following years, she earned an M.A. in Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College, where she developed expertise in digital audio and began a career writing software for media products. She worked for 8 years as a software engineer at Avid Technology, contributing to their Emmy and Oscar winning video editing product, Media Composer. While working at Avid, Courtney earned an M.B.A. from Babson College in the evenings. 

In 2005, Courtney moved west to the San Francisco Bay Area. Shortly after moving, she was hired by Apple as an engineering manager. She worked at Apple for 9 years, leading teams that contributed to the media functionality in macOS, iOS, tvOS, QuickTime Player, iMovie and iTunes. While at Apple, she became an expert in media accessibility technologies and led the effort to support subtitles, closed captions and audio descriptions across all of Apple’s products. 

Courtney joined Netflix in 2017. She first managed a team of engineers who develop the video player inside the Netflix App on Smart TVs, setup boxes, streaming sticks and game consoles. In 2020, Courtney moved to the Netflix Mobile team and led the team developing the platform architecture for Netflix’s iOS Mobile App.  As part of that effort, Courtney helped launch Netflix mobile games at the end of 2020, and transitioned into leading the team that developed a Games SDK to integrate games into the Netflix ecosystem in 2021.

At the end of 2022, Courtney returned to the East Coast and moved into an old farmhouse in Maine.  She continued to work for Netflix remotely until she resigned in July of 2023.

While at Netflix, Courtney also began a Master of Information in Data Science program at UC Berkeley.  She will graduate from that program in the August of 2023, and is pursuing a career in Data Science and Engineering.

In her free time, Courtney enjoys hiking and traveling. She continues to express her lifelong love of music by playing guitar and singing.