Susanna Holt

Vice President, Forge at Autodesk

San Francisco

As vice president of Forge at Autodesk, Susanna Holt drives the strategy and development of Autodesk’s design-to-make platform – an ecosystem of building blocks and web services for software developers. She leads a team of nearly 700 software engineers and professionals in this endeavor.

A veteran of the software industry for more than 20 years, Susanna was most recently the senior director of the Autodesk Forge Software Engineering team. Prior to that she served as a software development manager and senior software developer in Autodesk’s Cambridge office in the United Kingdom. With deep technical expertise in graphics and solid modeling, Susanna contributed to the solid modeling kernel used by AutoCAD, Inventor and other Autodesk software products. Prior to Autodesk, Susanna was a software developer at D-Cubed where she consulted for Spatial Inc. (acquired by Dassault Systèmes) and where she contributed to the team building a geometric solid modeler.

Susanna received her doctoral degree in mathematics from Heriot-Watt University and her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Susanna taught mathematics at the Open University and is a Women’s Masters and Mixed Masters rowing champion.