Meet Aparna Sinha, the powerful India-born woman technologist at Google

Sinha leads the team for the tech giant's cloud computing project Kubernetes and newly announced Anthos product

As the director of product management at Google, Aparna Sinha leads the team for cloud computing project Kubernetes, and Anthos, a new open platform that lets users r??un applications from anywhere. Kubernetes has become one of the most influential open source projects and originated from Google’s internal project called Borg. It was built to manage the tech giant’s extremely large infrastructure. The technology is now used by companies like ride-hailing firm Lyft, music streaming service Spotify, online retailer eBay and CERN, an European nuclear physics research organisation to run their large-scale applications.

Launched in 2015, Kubernetes Engine builds on Google's experience of running services like Gmail and YouTube in containers for over 12 years. Sinha, who lives in Palo Alto, a 15-minute drive from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, was in charge of several early Kubernetes releases. She has been working with the Kubernetes team at Google since 2016.

“I have really seen explosive growth (of Google Kubernetes Engine or GKE) in terms of the adoption. We have seen every type of company benefit from this technology,” says Sinha. This includes industries such as retail, financial sector, healthcare and gaming. “For me, it is rewarding when I get to see the real world applications. For example, Pizza Hut is running its online delivery of pizza on GKE.”

Choosing a career in technology was a natural option for Sinha, who was born and raised in Delhi, and grew up in a family that was highly oriented towards science. Her mother was a professor who taught physics at Delhi University. “I could see science is a way to explain the universe, but also it is a way to shape the world around us,” says Sinha who after her 12th standard received a scholarship to do her bachelors of science at Stanford University in the late 1990s. She later completed her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford and was responsible for developing new techniques for high-speed data communication in computer systems. “Many of my courses at Stanford focused on computer architecture,” says Sinha, who has several technical publications from her research and a patent at Google on Android Internet of Things protocols.

Prior to Google, Sinha had stints at tech companies such as Agilent, Intel and NetApp. At Google, Sinha is betting big on the Indian market for GKE and Anthos and is seeing a lot of traction from customers in the country. These include firms running online services like matrimony, retail and mobile applications on GKE.

GKE provides a managed environment for deploying, managing, and scaling containerised applications using Google infrastructure. The environment it provides consists of multiple machines grouped together to form a cluster. On the other hand, the new Anthos product lets customers build and manage modern hybrid applications on existing on-premises investments or in the public cloud. Built on open source technologies pioneered by Google—including Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative—Anthos enables consistency between on-premises and cloud environments.

Asked to share views about overcoming the challenges women face in the technology industry, Sinha said finding “confidence as a woman” particularly in the technical field is crucial. “Women can be very thorough in their preparation and I do believe that is important,” says Sinha. 

“I think over time, by building your confidence, you can learn and teach yourself anything, and investing in your own learning and development is something that as a woman I think is particularly important.”

Sinha believes confidence can be developed by taking on new challenges and proving oneself in new environments. “A key learning for me is always pushing yourself to go beyond your comfort zone,” she says.

She also says one factor that has helped her in building a successful career was to work with the smartest people, who are truly interested in innovation and creating an impact. “You have to find those people in your career. I feel Google Cloud is extremely rich in terms of the type of the people that are making those breakthroughs possible,” says Sinha.

Besides being passionate about her work at Google, Sinha, who lives in Palo Alto with her husband and two kids, enjoys dancing, yoga and volunteering at the local schools. “I like teaching my kids technology, maths and artificial intelligence. Learning through teaching them is something I enjoy a lot,” she concludes.