Yet, what made the project remarkable was not the technology—it was the change management. She conducted weekly “lunch and learn” sessions for warehouse managers, many of whom feared the new system would cost them jobs. By listening to their concerns and co-designing the user interface with their feedback, she turned skepticism into ownership. Ask anyone who has worked with Saroja Chepuru, and they will not first mention her technical skills. They will mention mentorship .
Her first full-time role was as a junior database programmer at a mid-sized healthcare IT firm in the Midwest. The work was unglamorous—debugging legacy systems, writing SQL queries, and attending endless requirement-gathering meetings. But Saroja saw every task as a masterclass. saroja chepuru story
One of her mentees, a software engineer now at Google, wrote: “Saroja taught me how to say ‘no’ to low-visibility work without sounding difficult. She said, ‘Your time is your equity. Invest it wisely.’ That changed my entire career trajectory.” No long-form story is complete without setbacks. In 2018, Saroja was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that required her to step back from full-time work for eight months. During that period, she was also laid off from her Enterprise Architect role due to company-wide restructuring—a double blow. Yet, what made the project remarkable was not