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Women transforming the future of tech at Veritas—Vaijayanti Bharadwaj and Asmita Jagtap

MrudulaAndhare
Level 1
Employee

If you have not already had the opportunity to read the interview with Angela & Su-jin about their collaboration to improve the stability and performance of NetBackup, I would recommend reading that first. To continue the celebration of Women's History Month and share the stories of women transforming the future of tech at Veritas, I sat down with Vaijayanti and Asmita. 

Briefly describe the impactful work you do. 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - I am a Technical Director in Data Protection Governance Engineering. I have been with Veritas for the 10+ years. I look at building innovative technologies that can help NetBackup scale and perform better for various workloads that demand this. 

Asmita Jagtap - I am a Technical Director in the Data Protection Governance Engineering (DPGE) organisation and have been part of the Veritas family for the past 18+ years. I started my journey in the Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) kernel team after which I moved to InfoScale Storage. I mainly worked on Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) including key solutions like Cluster Volume Manager (CVM) and Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) and later contributed to a couple of new product initiatives, namely HyperScale meant for hyper-converged primary storage and Iris for converged secondary storage. Presently I work with Netbackup, DPGE in the security team. 

What inspired you to pursue a career in tech? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - I love to design and architect software. It makes me feel powerful to create software. It inspires me to create software that is valuable to thousands of enterprises. 

Asmita Jagtap - As a child I would thoroughly enjoy science and experimentation. As I grew up, I watched my elder brother who was studying Computer Science and he taught me the basics of how a computer works. We had a PC running MS-DOS with no internet and the only way to transfer files was using a floppy disk after an obligatory virus scan. Later during my internship project at a start-up named Codito Technologies, I got to learn the Linux kernel internals, fell in love with systems programming and there was no looking back after that. 

What has kept you at Veritas? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - Being at Veritas allows me to be around good people who can be a sounding board for my ideas and help me grow more. 

Asmita Jagtap - Veritas is a core technology company with niche domains like storage and data protection. The culture here strongly promotes innovation and new ideas and has provided me with continuous learning and growth opportunities. I have also been fortunate to have met great people and mentors here to work with and learn from. 

We understand you're working on projects that will transform the solutions that Veritas offers. Can you tell us more about that? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - Today’s workloads are growing in terms of size and number of objects. Backup infrastructure needs a second look to handle this scale. I am currently leading efforts to come up with new techniques for handling this scale at a high performance. Also, using backup infrastructure to handle other use-cases such as analytics requires the catalog to step up to requirements of ML/AI. I am also leading efforts to build this infrastructure. 

Asmita Jagtap - As part of the NBU Security team, I’m currently looking into Ransomware Resiliency, which is a must for companies like Veritas, that deal with critical customer data. Netbackup has strong solutions aligned with the protect-detect-recover strategy, although ransomware is an ever-evolving threat and we need to be proactive to keep up with it as well as differentiate from competitors, especially as we move to newer form factors like Cloud and Kubernetes platforms.

What are some challenges you face as a woman as part of your work? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - I have never faced any challenge as a woman. I have been fortunate to have empowering home and work environments. 

Asmita Jagtap - A career in technology is more creative than it may seem and most productive work gets done when you’re in the flow. It’s not a 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. job. As a family person, at times I don’t get to work when I want to work which may break my flow of thoughts.

What's your advice to women that want to achieve a Technical Director role? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - I would advise women to find their strengths and to explore what they truly enjoy doing. Take the first few years of your career to go wide and explore new things to see where your strengths are and where you can add value. If you work well, growth in the initial few years is by default. Beyond that, it requires deliberate practice in the area that you choose to go deep in, to grow your skills in terms of picking up projects which stretch your capabilities and learning from good people and good teams. It is important to look beyond titles and compensation to identify good work and teams that help you grow. Titles and compensation will catch up. 

Asmita Jagtap - Be curious, look for learning opportunities, increase your knowledge in areas adjacent to your daily work as well. I would recommend participating in Veritas’ internal tech events like Illuminate, hackathon, etc. besides external technology conferences. It also counts to have meaningful interactions with the technical community within and outside Veritas and maintain a professional network. One of my mentors said this and it stayed with me, “take charge of your career, work towards your ambition, don’t wait for things to just happen.”

What advice would you give women on their journey to transform the future of tech? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - Every person has strengths that they bring to the table. Take time to understand your strengths and see how to leverage them to add value. 

Asmita Jagtap - Innovation is the key to the future. I would say keep some time aside for ideating and quick prototyping. Learn new technologies, follow open-source projects in your area of interest, and do not restrict yourself to the given problem statement; think above and beyond to develop a futuristic vision.

What do you like to do outside of work? 

Vaijayanti Bharadwaj - I like to read, and I am a fitness enthusiast. 

Asmita Jagtap - I like travelling with my family and being in nature. Besides that, I love to paint and learn new forms of visual arts. I’m also fond of kitchen gardening. 

Thank you to Vaijayanti and Asmita for sharing a little bit about their work and experience at Veritas. Veritas Technologies is growing, and we encourage you to explore open roles at our career page: https://www.veritas.com/company/careers.