Witad Awards 2023: Engineer/programmer of the year—Veena Padala, Morgan Stanley

Having joined Morgan Stanley only last year as a senior technical programmer, Veena Padala has already left her mark on the bank. A member of the firm’s Change Agent Network, a global coalition of internal thought leaders, Padala ranks as a role model, a high-performing and influential employee. She’s a leader in the bank’s DevOps Guild and is often sought out by other teams for her expertise and eye. And she’s already placed first in a firm-wide tech innovation competition that saw more than 130 submissions—not that such feats are out of character for Padala, who earned the top score in her engineering mathematics 3 course at Pune University.

Engineering was perhaps not as much a choice for her as it was a genetic predisposition. “I have always loved mathematics, and I’ve always had a good rapport with mathematics teachers. As a matter of fact, my dad was also a mathematics professor,” she says.

Padala began her career at Infosys, where she worked on domain match technology. As part of a client project for Yahoo Research, she quickly learned the programming language Perl and developed a way to display paid advertising for unmatched domains, areas of the web that would usually throw up an error message if stumbled upon.

If she must talk about herself, Padala will tell you that she’s a fast learner and adaptable. She can program in Perl, Java, Python, and C++. She knows the ins and outs of web technology, has worked on data warehouses, and, thanks to time she spent at Informatica, knows her way around a cloud environment. She doesn’t view the ever-changing trends in technology as a hinderance, but as a renewable source of motivation and stimulation.

Her manager, Jennifer Harper, was the one who began the process of converting Padala to a full-time employee from a consultant, a role she first adopted for Morgan Stanley in 2017. An ardent admirer of Padala, Harper says the bank is lucky to have her. “One of the things that really stands out for me about Veena is that she’s a strong advocate for herself,” Harper says. “Her career has not come without uphill struggles and challenges she’s had to push through, and she’s just extremely tireless in that pursuit.”

Padala emphasizes the need for women—and particularly those in her home country of India—to seek and be given exposure to the financial and technological worlds, which lead the global economy. “I would say to them not to give up, even if there are a lot of obstacles,” she says. “Just keep going.”