The unglossed version

In a room full of professionals I want to be introduced as an engineering leader. Not specifically a woman, just a strong engineering leader. In a personal setting I am a happy-go-lucky woman who fundamentally wants to meet everybody, understand them, and share stories. This site is where those two rooms become one.

I have been building software since 2012. Amazon, Limeroad, CureFit, my own company, Zupee, and today a VP of Engineering role leading teams in India. If there is one through-line in all of it, it is this: one customer complaint means hundreds are silently struggling with the same issue. Amazon shaped that in me, and it has stuck with me through every job since.

My first year at Amazon, my manager called it out plainly: I am not happy with your work. It was surprising, because I thought I was doing okay. I had been keeping my head down the way my family taught me, treating it like a government job where you just finish what you are given. Then I changed my entire strategy. I thought: how is it possible that Jyoti is not good technically? So I fixed it. I learned other teams' architectures, rebuilt my technical foundations, and won a Customer Obsession award. What I learned there is that I would be treated the way I behave, and if I want to be treated better, the professional performance has to come from me.

Limeroad gave me my best years. I joined as an engineer and did everything an engineer does in a whole lifetime: backend, frontend, databases, analytics, platform work, even the Android app. I never asked for a promotion; it happened naturally because I was so good at what I did. I also made my biggest mistake there. I deployed to production without properly learning the database underneath, and broke the entire orders system during one of our biggest sale events. I was horrified and literally in tears. A senior leader helped me out of it, and the lesson stayed forever: you are learning, respect the architecture, and never get overconfident.

The next stop taught me the opposite lesson: you should know where you do not fit. It was a very good paying job with great people, and I was still not myself there. I do not regret leaving, because if you do not learn to recognise the wrong fit, you keep making that mistake forever.

Then I did the thing nobody in my family had ever done. My batchmate and I put twenty lakh rupees of our own savings into a startup, left Bengaluru, and moved back in with our parents to build it. A lot of people who loved me were scared, and I do not blame them. My father said yes, you should do it. My husband said if anybody can do a startup, it is you. I ran the company, built the technology myself, and when the time came, I negotiated the sale end to end, alone, and someone paid for the tech I had created. The pride I have from that is simple: I know I can create something, and I can sell it.

I joined Zupee as Director of Engineering in March 2020, the month the country locked down. I had just sold my startup and wanted to travel the world; destiny had different plans. So I wrote the complete backend for a Ludo game in two months, myself, because if I was going to be home, I was going to build something. I loved games as a kid, and what I cared about was never whether players won or lost, but how much fun they had while playing.

Here is the thing I believe about ambition that surprises people: I never want to be number one. I always want to be number two. Being number two keeps me engaged, because there is always something more to improve, and that keeps me grounded and happy.

When I think about leadership, I picture two women. The first is my mother, who worked in a government institution all her working life: the most diligent, most focused person I know, clear about her priorities, leading with logic and a lot of care for everybody around her. I am filled with gratitude to have her in my life. The second is Indra Nooyi, because she talks about the things that really matter: the hardships, and how it feels to be the only woman in the room. I bought her book. I am very bad at reading books. I admire her anyway, and someday I want to talk to her in person.

People ask what all of this cost me. Honestly: I could have slept more, and maybe I could have given more of myself to motherhood. But I have learned something about myself. I am okay walking away from work; I am not okay walking away from the people I love. And work is a very important part of my happiness. If I am not happy at work, I will be far unhappier in my own life. So I choose where I work very carefully, so that the time I put in is not just a cost. It is real value.

My mother does not entirely understand this website. Why do you need to talk about all this, she says. Take it easy. Live your life. But there is an internal voice that answers her: if anybody should do this, it should be me. Some people will read these pages and think I carry baggage. I think somebody has to go first.

I am also a mother and a wife, and over the years women have asked me, in hallways and one-on-ones, the questions they could not ask out loud at work. This site exists so those questions get real answers, from someone who has sat in the engineer's chair, the founder's chair, and the manager's chair. Ask me anything. I read every question myself.