Her Story
About Sowmya
Sowmya Modugula serves as VP of Engineering at Double Verify, an advertisement tech company in New York City. In this role, she oversees multiple teams and is responsible for setting vision, prioritizing initiatives, and delivering DV products through her engineering and quality engineering groups. She brings 23 years of experience to the position, having started as a developer at Sun Microsystems and progressed through engineering, architecture, and management roles at Audible, Honeywell, and a decade-long stint at a telecom startup. Modugula holds an undergraduate degree from BITS Pilani in India and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has completed a financial certification course from Wharton Business School and maintains technical certifications from Sun, Oracle, and Amazon. Among her professional achievements, she manages the processing and monitoring of approximately 10 billion ad impressions daily and previously contributed to Verizon Cloud, supporting 50 million customers. Modugula actively mentors women in technology within her organization through lunch-and-learn sessions and one-on-one coaching, emphasizing proactive work habits, delegation skills, and negotiation strategies. Outside of work, she volunteers at schools in Bernard Township.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sowmya
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say definitely to grow. Most of the women that come to me are like kind of women in tech again who are like early in their career being like a kind of a software engineer. So the advice I give them is like obviously be proactive be on top of things and how we can efficiently deliver the work. And also getting into the management space is like okay how to also delegate. Like I know you can do it maybe you can do it in half an hour but coaching someone else can take like 2 hours of your time so people lean towards okay let me finish this work. But I always suggest them like it's worth spending the additional time to coach somebody to mentor somebody so that way you can delegate and that's how you move across and take bigger responsibilities because you can think about bigger challenges now. And have someone actually deliver the deliver certain things that you were being an expert before. So that is one of the big things I coach and also about the negotiation because most of the times women undervalue themselves I feel in the tech industry and they don't talk about their promotions they don't talk about their compensation but that is one how do we negotiate and how do we bring that discussion with the manager is something I do mention as well.
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