Her Story
About Charu
I started my career after graduating in 2012, working for a few years in India before coming to America to pursue my master's in computer science. I received a full scholarship and was honored with a Best Research Paper Award during my master's program. I began as a research assistant at the University of Cincinnati, then joined ESPN as a software engineer working on monetizing ads. At Spotify, I led the 2020 Wrapped campaign end-to-end, which was incredibly rewarding to see on my phone with all my friends tagging me. I also built the podcast team from ground up when there was no podcast feature at Spotify. At Google, specifically YouTube, I worked on controlling all the traffic of YouTube in real time and batch processing, focusing heavily on reliability and performance to make sure YouTube is up and running in good shape. Since August 2024, I've been a senior software engineer at Microsoft, where I work on making OpenAI models work inside Microsoft Azure and productionizing them to ensure they are at par quality with OpenAI. I've worked on all the OpenAI models and recently worked on rolling out the MH model. My current role involves working with thousands of customers across Germany, India, and Europe, helping them when they're not able to reach SLAs or experiencing production outages. I've automated many workflows that used to require significant human effort, writing pipelines to automate quality checks on thousands of models on the fly, which has been very rewarding and allowed our team to focus on other important work. I'm also a mom of two, and I balance my work responsibilities with my family life.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Charu
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
When I was starting out, I used to doubt myself in everything. But one advice I got was that you should never see that you are a level below the other person. Just think that we all are humans, and everyone has something to bring on the table, so just be yourself and just think that you're equal with everyone. That's when you perform the best.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I mentor a lot of young women, and when I was starting out, I used to doubt myself in everything. But one advice I got that I now share is that you should never see that you are a level below the other person. Just think that we all are humans, and everyone has something to bring on the table, so just be yourself and just think that you're equal with everyone. That's when you perform the best.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest opportunity is how to use AI that can make us work even faster. You can use AI to automate a lot of things. You don't have to do manually, like number crunchings, for example. I think that's the biggest opportunity - use it for your best. Just try it out, just get your hands dirty, and then you learn it. Use the tools.
Keep Exploring
More Influential Women · Washington
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.