Her Story
About Meena
I began my technology career in 1993 after studying computer science in college, where I scored very high grades. My father was in the Air Force, so we moved frequently between states. When applying to colleges in a new state, someone noticed my excellent scores and recommended I pursue computer science, which was a brand new concept in the 1990s that nobody really understood. I completed my Master's in Computer Science and immediately had to adapt to market demands - the languages I learned like Pascal and Fortran weren't in demand, so I taught myself AS400RPG for mid-range computer systems. This led to my first job in the UK rather than India. I then came to the US to work on Y2K mainframe problems using COBOL. When the mainframe era ended and the .NET boom started, I quickly transitioned to front-end programming with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to stay relevant. As new technologies emerged - Java, Enterprise Microservices, Cloud - I continuously adapted and learned. My main strength is learning and adopting new technologies, which has kept me thriving in this field. Today at Walmart, I champion agentic autonomous development and lead multi-tenant platform development for our global retail operations across multiple countries. As a Distinguished Architect, I give frequent tech talks within my company, sometimes to audiences of over 6,000 people. I recently spoke about how engineers should embrace AI rather than fear it, explaining that AI won't take jobs but those who know how to work with AI will replace those who don't. I'm also speaking at Grace Hopper and working toward my goal of becoming a Fellow - the technical equivalent of a VP - where I aspire to be among the leadership group.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Meena
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to my curiosity to learn new things and being very adaptive to change. I don't fear change or new technologies. Recently, when engineers in my company were fearing that AI would take away their jobs because AI is doing all the coding, I gave a talk to around 500 people explaining that AI is just a new way of working that we need to adopt. I told them that AI isn't going to take their job - if they learn how to work with AI, they'll be fine, but if they don't, then somebody else who knows how to work with AI will take the job. So it's not the AI itself that's the threat. I've given many tech talks within my company because I'm part of the global tech organization, and one of my talks had over 6,000 people join to listen. My ability to continuously learn and adapt to new technologies - from mainframes to .NET to Java to Cloud to AI - is what has kept me successful throughout my nearly 30-year career.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I ever received came from my mentor, who told me that I need to know my audience when I'm talking. I tend to become very technical when I'm speaking, and my mentor said that while I have a lot of information, I need to adjust based on who I'm talking to. If I'm talking to my manager or leadership like a VP, I need to boil down to high-level impact. VPs want to know what the impact was of the work they assigned. But when I'm talking to developers, I can go deep dive technical with them. Developers don't care about high-level impact - they want to get into the nitty-gritty details. They sometimes think architects are living in an ivory tower just giving advice, so when I work with developers, I show them that I can also get hands-on dirty with the code and deep dive with them. This advice about switching my communication style based on my audience has been invaluable.
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