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

 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 skillsand 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.

“I did notice a few things, though, as time passed by. For example, if you are female and you are an engineer, it’s really difficult to be likeable, especially if you’re ambitious and trying to get your point of view across.  To be heard, you needed to be aggressive, and you needed to be comfortable with asking for opportunities and not just waiting for them to come your way,” she said in an interview with OPB.

So Ruchi changed her style of work to better fit into the “aggressive” environment demanded.    

In her five years of career at the social network, Ruchi held responsibility for building some of its key features like Newsfeed. “When we launched it, in 2006, users hated it. There were 'I Hate Facebook' groups; random people organized protests. We even hired a security team. But people ended up using the site twice as much, and then FriendFeed and LinkedIn launched similar feeds.”

Later, she saw the company grow from a startup into world’s biggest social network and then she thought, it's time to take the next step.

In an urge to pursue her passions and dreams, Ruchi left Facebook in 2010. According to Ruchi, “I no longer ‘felt inspired’ by the work I was doing at Facebook.” So she set up her own company Cove, with her husband Aditya Agarwal, who was also an early Facebooker.  

In February 2012, in order to own her talent,Dropbox, the cloud storage service brought Cove and made Ruchi their VP of operations.

“We’ve known Ruchi and Aditya for awhile and have been longtime admirers of their work, there are not too many people in this world who not only think big but have also created things that hundreds of millions of people use,” told Dropbox’s CEO Drew Houston to TechCrunch about the Cove acquire.

From the first female engineer of Facebook to the VP of Dropbox at the age of 30, Ruchi has an advice to the aspiring women community:”My philosophy is that you should go full force ahead until you are ready for the next step. A lot of women decide to take a back seat in their professional careers even before they are pregnant or are ready to have children.”