Poorani Muthusamy

Poorani Muthusamy serves as a Senior Application Developer at Starbucks in Seattle, Washington. In this role for the past three years, she leads the workforce management platform, architecting new features, maintaining operations, handling labor compliance, and guiding the migration from Blue Yonder to UKG while making key engineering decisions for scheduling and staffing needs across North American stores. Her career began at the Indian Space Research Organization, where she spent nearly 12 years as an engineer developing satellite ground system software and leading projects for remote sensing satellites, communication satellites, lunar rovers, and interplanetary missions, including research on ML-based anomaly detection. She later worked as a consultant through 9Logic Technologies in a tech advisory capacity for a startup and supported the modernization of the Costco Travel Platform before joining Starbucks. Poorani earned her bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from Rama Krishna Engineering College in 2008, where she was the gold medalist in her department. She is a member of IEEE and ACM. She attributes her success to hard work and the values of truthfulness and honesty instilled by her father, and she emphasizes mentoring juniors by trusting but verifying while teaching them to fish rather than handing them solutions. In advising young women entering technology, she stresses knowing the fundamentals of AI and technology to avoid over-reliance on third-party systems and to enable independent innovation even as data evolves.