Golovnina began working for Reuters in 2001 in Tokyo. She worked in London, Singapore and Seoul before being posted in Russia from 2002 to 2005, where she covered topics such as the Moscow theater hostage crisis. In 2005, she became Reuters' chief correspondent in Central Asia. She covered the presidential election in Afghanistan in 2009 and did several stints in Iraq. She moved to the London editing desk in 2010. In 2011, she traveled to Tripoli to cover the Libyan Civil War, where she was a part of the team that received Reuters' first Pulitzer Prize nomination in its history. In 2013, she became Reuters' bureau chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a position she held until her death in 2015.