Her Story
About Arnika
Arnika Karthikeyan is an engineering operations and technical program management leader with almost 10 years of experience across automotive AI and related industries. She began her career with a degree in telecommunications engineering followed by a master's in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University. She joined a telecom company as a product manager and advanced to a management role leading the order management team. She then moved to a startup focused on grocery delivery, serving as data quality lead where she worked to reduce daily mistakes and led multiple teams. For almost four years, she has been at Cruise, now GM, starting in data labeling operations and advancing to lead the team. Her main area of expertise is scaling human-in-the-loop processes for AI. She values empathy in connecting with people and attributes her success to hard work along with advice from mentors both personally and professionally. She advises that a career is a lattice rather than a ladder, encouraging risk-taking and experimentation.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Arnika
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think definitely hard work for sure, but I would also say a lot of good advice from mentors, both personally and professionally.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
Your career isn't a ladder, it's a lattice, which means you have to be willing to take risks and really experiment with identifying what you like before fully diving into it.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Your career isn't a ladder, it's a lattice, which means you have to be willing to take risks and really experiment with identifying what you like before fully diving into it.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The field itself is very up and coming, and so I think we're very pioneers in the field. Trying to experiment with our processes and identify workflows that create the most impact. I think it's been a learning process.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Empathy is really big for me. Being able to connect with people on that level.
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.