Lavanya Bhallamudi, a Principal S/W Engineering Manager at Microsoft looks back at the early days of IIIT-Hyderabad, that shaped vision, infused confidence and structured purpose while keeping her easy going attitude intact.
An eye for problem solving, forged in the computer science labs of IIIT Hyderabad shaped Lavanya Bhallamudi’s career arc, from Wipro technologies, Motorola, Oracle, Realpage and Amazon to her current role at Microsoft. She specializes in building applications that address complex, unstructured user problems.
Leap of faith by early batches
Lavanya, an alumna of the third batch, joined IIIT Hyderabad thanks to the investigative zeal of her father, a software professional. He had heard great things about the new research-focused institute on his IT grapevine.
The year was 2000. Still ambivalent about the decision, it was the first day orientation program and a lunch hosted by the early batches that sealed the deal. The campus vibe was beautiful and it looked like a safe place to be. “It was exciting to meet peers, top-rankers in competitive exams and I wanted to be around such go-getters. At that point, I wasn’t even sure if we would get a B. Tech degree, because the Institute was still awaiting accreditation”, remarks Lavanya. “It was a leap of faith because of our unwavering belief in the vision and passion of Prof. Sangal and college faculty who came with great credentials”.
Undergraduate life ticked off many boxes for the carefree youngster- a well-appointed single room, a great hostel, visionary professors, research ecosystem and most of all, a sprawling verdant campus.
Enlightening moments under the burgeoning Banyan
It is the small things that bolster confidence and offer glimpses of what you can do, if you attune your mind to it, observes Lavanya.
The carefree and easy going persona went into suspended animation. “Being with the brightest of bright minds, in faculty and contemporaries, it was but natural that I raised my goals. Our visionary faculty – Prof. CV Jawahar and Prof. PJ Narayanan were deeply inspiring”. Prof. Karlapalem’s Open book exam concept would become a well-entrenched foundational move! It makes you think through and solve problems on the go, in a limited time-frame; a skill that prepares you to face any challenge thrown at you. Propelled into situations with 100% chances of failure, you learn to swim and actually do well”.
With Prof. Jawahar, her team built a sound recorder application, writing driver level code, to work on Linux. Prof. Govindarajulu’s data structures classes were laced with humour, wit and sarcasm that kept them on their toes. Her final year project, in an era predating the smart phone, looked at compressing a huge database for applications on a mobile device. Scouring research papers, studying the latest in the tech biosphere and adapting it for limited memory footprint on the phone was exciting.
Flashback to simpler times
Homesickness apart, college life in the early days of IIIT Hyderabad for a girl student was a different cup of tea. Her batch mates became her trust circle. Somewhere between managing classes, assignments, chasing deadlines and new friendships, ‘the laidback, non-studious type’, discovered purpose. “A job well done is important but so is factoring in the fun aspect”, says Lavanya who enjoyed indoor games, badminton and throwball sessions, late night movies with batch mates and volunteering for the Asian Games at the Gachibowli stadium next door.
Twenty years back, IIIT-H was very secluded. Explorations of street food would mean taking a seven-seater auto to Lingampalli or Indiranagar. The entire college came together to organise Felicity, recalls the alumna, who as cultural committee member in 2004, helped organise sponsorships for the festival. Class picnics to the Golconda fort and Nagarjuna Sagar, practice with her music group for competitions, trying out electives like economics, painting or archaeology added to the “fun memories”.
Today, alumni meets and counselling final year batches keep those moments fresh. At Microsoft and Amazon, the IIIT-H connection stays robust since “I was fortunate to work with several IIIT-H students as their team-member, manager or mentor”, she adds.
Razr-edge of the mobile revolution
Campus placement at Wipro was a nice launchpad that built confidence but was not in sync with her mobile tech goals. A switch to Motorola and she was finally working at the frontline of the mobile revolution, in the middleware field. “Motorola was riding the success wave of Razr. It was good work and I made great friends there”, observes Lavanya, who later moved to Oracle to work on telecom applications and middleware projects as principal engineer.
At one point, she realised that working on C, C++, and middleware code was limiting her opportunities. Fortuitously, two wonderful events came together that helped her change tracks; motherhood and SaaS.
SaaS was taking off and Lavanya made the switch and taught herself micro services and its architecture. In the interim, she took on a senior managerial role in cloud computing and employee management at Real Page. “The nature of my work and my role shifted suddenly. It was an enriching phase. I was learning a new space of work, understanding how to scale applications and researching how large conglomerates like Google were building applications”. The learning loop never stopped.
It was also a turning point. From solving technical issues as an individual contributor, now as manager, she was now solving bigger problems at the workplace. “I discovered that connecting pieces and growing people gave me fresh energy. I enjoyed it”.
Amazon, Alexa & Microsoft
Lavanya’s move to Amazon, as engineering manager on the newly launched Alexa team, was the start of an amazing journey. Alexa was in the nascent stage and that was a time of great experimentation and learning.
The telecom expert joined Microsoft five years back as an engineering manager for two teams – data science and applications, that interfaced with surface businesses and products. Today, her specialisation is in cloud applications; fixing efficiencies through foundational ideas, data-driven insights and building applications.
Venturing into AI and data science is now on the radar of the constant learner, whose early education happened in Visakhapatnam and Narayana coaching classes. Textbooks and scribbled notebooks were Lavanya’s universe till she realised that this is not how you flourish in the real world. “You need to do your own research, build applications around it and map it to real-world problems”. That was the philosophy seeded in IIIT Hyderabad.
Grit, guts and glory
If an award is time, effort and excellence made visible, Lavanya’s zeal and work ethic received high visibility. The Microsoft Leadership Excellence Award is the latest in the honour roll that includes Unsung Hero by Amazon, Oracle’s Above and Beyond Award, Oracle’s Spot Award (2011) and Motorola’s ‘Bravo’ for end-to-end development of a Payload Simulator which reduced testing effort by 70%.
Change-maker’s secret sauce
Lavanya’s role model is her father, a chemical engineer from BHPV who reinvented himself in the private sector and reskilled into a coding career. Her love of science and computers was ignited by discussions with her father and science fiction books.
Post-COVID, she stays physically fit and mentally robust with badminton, swimming, yoga and meditation. Carnatic, Hindustani and Western classical top her music library. Her eclectic reading choices in anthropology, archaeology, Indian culture and Hindu mythology are weekend manna for the soul. Gardening and painting are hobbies that channel her creativity into roots, leaves and water-colours. Family time with her husband and young daughter, and tending her balcony garden gives her infinite joy. She believes that one needs to stridently invest time to protect your peace of mind and keep your body fit. Community service especially in sustainable water and solar solutions is something that Lavanya is passionate about.
Encapsulating the wisdom of two decades in a quickly changing tech landscape, Lavanya leaves the IIIT-H students with these words of advice. Beyond tools, youngsters should focus on taking advantage of IIIT-H’s research culture to constantly reinvent themselves. Strong fundamentals and core concepts, a learning for life mind-set and the ability to communicate ideas clearly, both verbal and written are features that will help you, irrespective of what waves you are thrown into.
Deepa Shailendra is a freelance writer for interior design publications; an irreverent blogger, consultant editor and author of two coffee table books. A social entrepreneur who believes that we are the harbingers of the transformation and can bring the change to better our world.