Meet The Indian Girl Who Was Facebook's First Female Engineer

Bangalore: Ruchi Sangvi grew up in a small town in Pune. In her teens, Ruchi always wanted to be like her father, who is a business man. "My dad owns an engineering company that lends equipment to industrial projects. I've been obsessed with taking it over since I could talk. I'd follow him and repeat conversations about how many tons of cranes were arriving. But he said it was a man's world,” and according to Ruchi, that was one of her biggest motivations. “I wanted to prove him wrong.” The determination had brought her into one of Silicon Valley’s most respected tech personality and an inspiration to women who wish to break into the male- dominated field of engineering.

After finishing her engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, the technical skills and enthusiasm opened her doors to one of the most celebrated startups at that time, Facebook. She was the first female engineer hired at Facebook. She had mentioned her earlier days at Facebook in an interview with BBC: “The culture at Facebook, was something of a change. Programmers came to work in their pajamas, working in an office with walls covered in graffiti, located above a Chinese food place that stank up the whole building. It was also difficult to break into the boys’ club.” Her male colleagues at that time even had a ‘brogramming page,’ Sort of a boys’ club for programmers. Facebook, to Ruchi was turning out to be the man’s world that her father had spoken of.