As of 2017 she was Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures[5] and Vice President of Engineering at Google. While she was working in Google's Android organization, Patterson was responsible for a division of Google Play including Books and Search, Recommendations and Infrastructure for scaling up Android from 40 million phones to over 800 million phones.[6]
She co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine (which she created after leaving Google in 2007)[1] and wrote Recall.archive.org (part of the Wayback Machine), a history-based search engine out of the Internet Archive, which showed trends over time.