Radha Sankaran

I began my professional journey in 1989 in India with a background in electrical engineering, working on transformer design for large power and furnace transformers. In 1992, I came to the United States and completed my Master's degree in electrical engineering, specializing in large-scale integrated circuit design at SUNY Stony Brook. I started at AT&T Bell Labs in 1994, where I held various engineering roles and made the transition from hardware to software engineering. Throughout my career in the telecom industry from 1994 through 2022, I developed deep expertise in the entire software engineering lifecycle. My work encompasses everything from defining products and developing them to bringing them to life and managing their complete lifecycle. I focus on ensuring products work well in the field, bringing resiliency to what we build, and defining new concepts and features. My responsibilities span the full spectrum from strategy through execution, including architecture, design, and working with teams to deploy new features. One of my proudest achievements was at Verizon, where I was tasked with building a platform for one-to-one personalized customer experiences. I started as a single person in the organization and grew it to 250 strong, which is today one of the core organizations at Verizon that builds customer experiences. What drives me is maintaining that analytical mindset and curiosity that I developed early in my career, recognizing that this is a constant learning journey and you're never at a point where you know it all.