Witad Awards 2021: WatersTechnology woman of the year—Vrinda Menon, JP Morgan

Vrinda Menon is many things: an engineer, a mathematician, a technologist, an immigrant, a mother, a wife, a daughter, and JP Morgan Private Bank’s first-ever South Asian female CTO. That’s not an exhaustive list.

She joined the bank as CTO for operations and client services in 2018, following a 14-year run as a Goldman Sachs, where her last role was as managing director of operations engineering. If one can sum up a life, perhaps it can be done with the word “achievements”—in Technicolor. Before immigrating to the US from India, Menon attended Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India—a school that boasts just a 1.47% acceptance rate, according to 2012 data. When Menon was at the university, her schoolmates included 384 men and 16 women.

“I was used to being different. And I never looked at myself as a woman exactly in that sense,” she says. “I had the benefit of having thick skin and not really knowing the difference because I grew up in a family where there was my brother and I, and we were treated no differently. But the world is different, and I think people’s experiences are different, and how people react to those experiences are different. So I want to make sure that for everybody that feels that way, I can help make a difference to them—for them—to grow.”

Growth has been a continual theme in Menon’s life and career. Her father was a farmer in India, who also became an engineer through sheer grit. When she married and had two children early on in her career, she took time off to solely focus on raising her kids, but quickly realized she needed a form of fulfillment that could not be found through her husband’s job or her children’s education. That was a defining moment for her.

“I really felt like, ‘Okay, this is for you, and this is for your own achievement.’ And so I focused on my career and my job in a different way because I valued it for myself—not for the money, not for anything except my own personal sense of achievement,” she says.

What she most prides herself on—and there is much to be proud of—is striking a balance between life and work. Priorities skew toward one or the other from time to time, of course, but she says having a life that is well-balanced and fulfilling is her greatest accomplishment.