Ramya Ganesh

I believe in sharing and giving what I've learned to the community, to the tech community. That's my way of contributing to the tech community, because I feel that it's always the community that matters these days, because nothing can be learned in solo. It requires a lot of collaboration to learn and share what we have learned in the process. I do a lot of speaking at events, I've spoken in OWASP, I've spoken in many technical conferences internationally as well, and I go to universities and speak with the student communities and mentor them. This is something I've been doing for the past couple of years, because that's the way I believe is the only way I can contribute to the tech community, by sharing. The statistics about women in cyber, which is still 23% as of 2026, is something that inspires me. I always feel like this is where I've been working and learning, and this has inspired me to give to the community, to have more women join the workforce. Though if I can inspire just one person out there in the tech community, I feel that's a big achievement for me. For me, leadership is inspiring at least one person. It's not the visibility thing, but at least one person who sees what I'm doing and if I can get that person inspired by what I do, and if they join the workforce that we all commonly do as one community, as a mission to get more women in the workforce or in the cyber community, I draw inspiration from that work. That kind of pushes me to do what I do every day.

I would say that as a woman, we always kind of think that we have amazing capabilities, but we always underestimate ourselves, especially in tech, especially in meetings, especially when we need help and we want to ask for help. Get as many mentors as possible, because that kind of elevates the career. Many women I see do not ask for help. They think that asking help is sometimes viewed as something that they're not capable of. Always get your visibility up, whatever you do, do it out in the public so people know what you're doing. That's something I would advise women in the technical world: getting the visibility up and asking for help when needed. Reach out to as many mentors as possible. We're always looking for somebody who can mentor us in any phase of our career or professional life. There's always someone we look up to as a person we want to reach there, so looking for mentors, looking for somebody who has already reached there, actually accelerates that process to get some guidance. Always push yourself and get out of the comfort zone, because sometimes we always get stuck in a comfort zone. Challenge yourself to do things that you have not done before, always get ready to do something that you have never done. That's something that pushes everybody, not just professionally, but personally as well.

My current obstacle has always been the new learning every day. We have been doing a lot of AI-led initiatives, and every day there is something, a roadblock or a challenge, or something that we have to solve as an engineer in general, that we have not done before. We've all been using AI for work. There's no traditional methods that we are using that we had used before and now. So it's a constant learning every day, and it's a constant fixing of new issues that we have not seen before. That itself poses a challenge every day. One is to get myself to learn all the jargons that everybody has to be familiar with, and also teach my team, and also encourage my team to keep themselves up to date with all the AI learnings that everybody has to deal with. We as an engineer have to keep learning and keep going, because there's always a new issue that we have to fix, we have to solve as an engineer. That's kind of the biggest challenge that I have right now. But that is also kind of a good thing to do, because challenges push us forward.