Mounica Veggalam

Mounica Veggalam, Leadership Coach

Most impactful leadership lies at the intersection of:
- Personal growth
- Showing up with strong presence
- Learning to connect and lead other humans

I support leaders to scale their impact and create business results by guiding them through the above areas.

Career and Leadership Coach

Microsoft

I often get asked, “How are you a leadership coach when you haven’t been a manager yourself?”

The leadership I talk about is not strategic or tactical.

It’s self-leadership.

Your career trajectory — whether you reach C-Suite heights, or stay stuck in the middle — it starts with you. With what’s going on inside you.

This is the powerful lesson I realized at Microsoft. 

I observed inadequate leadership, average leadership, and excellent leadership. 

I was in heated design discussion rooms, witnessed managers make technical choices from their insecurities, and noticed the best empathetic leaders lost in overwhelm without any recognition.

I also saw powerful leadership from people who challenged the status quo. And challenged their own beliefs.

They were the people who did the right thing
- even when they’re anxious,
- even when they’re frustrated,
- even when they were at the edge of saying, “screw this sh**”

Your frustrations, disappointments, and resentments are where your growth opportunities lie.

When you understand and transform your inner landscape, your capacity for leadership expands, and you'll see the outside results: the promotion, the better project, and the better titles.

That’s the best way to make an impact in this world.

This is transformational leadership.

If you want to learn to lead your people from the inside-out, reach out and we’ll talk.

I am deeply invested in my personal transformation and leadership. That’s how I’m a leadership coach. That’s how I lead my clients to discover entirely new ways of presenting themselves.

I offer trainings, coaching and deep personal transformation, so you can feel fulfilled in your leadership mission. Send me a private message and we’ll chat.

Software Engineer

Practice Fusion

One of my mentors there asked, “Would you rather teach your kids to be smart or to be kind?”

What if I could do both?

With that question, I realized how starkly I’m drawn to deep philosophical concepts and the nature of the human mind. 

And this realization would set it in years later. But I didn’t know that then.

This internship was my entry into the software engineering world. 

It was incredible, surrounded by brilliant people in the startup culture. This is where I released my first feature into production, had my first exceptional manager, and gave my first talk in front of 200 smart people (I was terrible). 

It paved the way for another incredible role at Microsoft.

I won’t lie— I was arrogant about my IQ and my ability to grasp technical concepts quickly.

But I also had crippling self-doubt and introversion that got in the way of my impact.

Even through all that, a couple of things are common today:
— I value people and human connection. Regardless of my arrogance and self-doubt.
— I’m constantly pushing myself beyond my comfort zone. No matter how scary it is.
— I always look at my side of things. Even when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to.

Today, this helps me serve my clients powerfully, 
— I point to the truth at the risk of them not liking me.
— I can deeply support them in facing the risks and uncertainities.
— I invest time and energy in confronting my beliefs and blindspots, so they don’t have to manage my ego.

It's a deeply rewarding experience.

Software Development Engineer Intern

Life & leadership coach for professionals, leaders and entrepreneurs | Software engineer turned coach & inner-work guide

Hi there! 👋 I’m Mounica. I help visionary tech leaders fast-track their careers so they can create more impact, build stronger teams, and bring their vision to reality, all with joyful life-balance.

I’m a software engineer turned transformational coach. Throughout my career, I was driven and confident on the outside. I achieved accolades, promotions, and patents. On the side, I tried to handle all my dissatisfaction with life through meditation and spiritual studies.

But none of that changed the *experience of life.*

I was always looking into the future for everything to settle down. My conversations lacked joy. I was subtly controlling in my relationships so I didn't break down. I was obsessed with achievement. 

Now I have a general sense of creative joy while taking up big projects. And I'm more present with my family.

It wasn't an overnight transformation (nothing worthwhile ever is). I approach this work from an intersection of developmental psychology (think ontological leadership and Robert Kegan's constructive map) and Eastern non-dual spirituality. 

Here are 3 levels of transformation you can expect through working with me:
1. Embodying your leadership voice & an internal compass, so you show Executive Presence.
2. Holding multiple, often conflicting, perspectives, so you bring a vision you deeply desire to reality.
3. Holding multiple identities, so you find creative joy in every choice you make (and have you ready for non-dual interconnected perception of the world).

This work is not about adding knowledge or skills but creating a *fundamentally different kind of mind* that takes the largest perspective, is more complex, and can handle more uncertainty.

My clients report:
- Influence without losing their ethics or empathy
- Command respect in a room full of brilliant (or skeptical) people
- Have ease, joy, and fun creating the results they want

If you’re curious, send me a DM!

Helping tech managers fast-track their careers with personalized 1:1 coaching.

I help with -
- Making tough career decisions
- Landing the next big role and making a vertical moves
- Transforming into a leader who delivers, impacts, and inspires.

Management skills and Relationships come easy to people managers. But what sets you apart is the Leadership mindset. I help managers become leaders and achieve their career goals along the way. 

The typical titles of my clients include:
- Engineering Manager
- Director of Engineering/Program/Product Management
- PM Manager
- Senior/Principal Engineers/PM

Palo Alto Networks

• Spearheaded Compute Infrastructure and Platform Engineering initiatives across GCP, AWS, and OCI, enhancing operational excellence.  
• Drove the development of GenAI Studio, accelerating AI/ML/LLM deployment for critical workloads.  
• Improved DNS cache service availability from 99.9% to 99.999%, significantly boosting reliability.  
• Reduced operational toil by 80% through the introduction of an auto-remediation platform based on StackStorm.
. Revolutionizing the compute (200K vCpu) and Storage Infra (100 clusters) across PANW from de-central model to centralized model using Openshift.

Engineering Leader @ Palo Alto Networks

Snowflake

- Drove the SLO/SLA culture across org and company. Initiative resulted in reducing the compute/data node provisioning latency by 3x and end user warehouse resume latency by 100x
- Building next generation compute-as-a-service infra across all major cloud providers AWS, GCP and
Azure.
- Setting the mission and vision for the compute infrastructure team 
- Hiring exceptional talent and building great infrastructure platforms
- Deep understanding of public cloud computing challenges and best practices with emphasis on compute life cycle management, operational excellence and cost efficiency.
- Driving cross functional alignment to reduce free pool costs of compute

Engineering Leader

Sumo Logic

Own a distributed, highly available, and fault-tolerant time-series database to power Sumo Observability platform (Metrics/Tracing)
Led the cross geo team to scale the platform from ingestion to 6X and query to (12X).
Setting the vision/mission of the observability platform and driving the cross geo team in delivering the
business results and improving the processes to achieve revenue efficiency and adoption.
Within the first year, aligned cross functional teams to increase revenue by $XX million dollars.
Grooming next gen engineering leaders.
Managed AWS services such as Cassandra, Kafka, Redis,ElasticSearch while delivering the business objectives with improved cost efficiency.

Senior Engineering Manager

LinkedIn

Tech lead Manager for a cross discipline organization consisting of engineering, UX and data scientist.
Built a next generation notifications platform to connect the sellers to the right buyer at the right time.
Drove the Design/Architecture of full stack change from offline/mid-tier/backend/front end services.
Leveraged open source technologies like Apache Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Presto/Pinot.
Data Model Review committee member that ensure data models are consistent across all layers (offline,
tracking, online and nearline)
Experience with cloud services at scale on Azure

Staff Software Engineer

Salesforce

Einstein Bots as a Service: Responsible for
building/scaling of real time chatbot SaaS platform to improve customer service experience.
Scaled the platform to support web, mobile, SMS and FB channels.
Worked with data science team to successfully integrate NLP models.
Trailblazed Cloud to cloud authentication.
Helped CTO 2020 with the next generation architecture for Retail Cloud

Einstein Analytics:
One of the key contributors in making Salesforce Wave platform successful by leading the effort to
improve the performance and scaling of the engine (Wave platform) during the process filed 3 patents.
Improved the performance of the engine by more than 200% for most of the common queries with-in one
release.

As a tech lead ran cross scrum team effort to lead the full stack
design change in ETL pipeline and Query optimization layer and successfully finished with-in one
major release with world class quality for both mobile and desktop.

Designed and implemented low latency, fault tolerant and highly available Salesforce query engine.
Designed and implemented unified framework to test across multiple devices/browsers. Resulted in reducing the time taken to run 4k tests from 15 minutes to under 15 seconds.
Built on-call strategy and defined SLO/SLAs for the serviceDesigned and implemented low latency, fault tolerant and highly available Salesforce query engine. Designed and implemented unified framework to test across multiple devices/browsers. Resulted in reducing the time taken to run 4k tests from 15 minutes to under 15 seconds. Built on-call strategy and defined SLO/SLAs for the service

Principal Software Engineer

Contributed to Visual Studio 2011 Lab management SKU and Built performance and stress tools for web services for on premise and SaaS.

Software Developer In Test 2

Mentor Graphics ( now Siemens)

Built various processor support packages for ARM, resulting in 2 million $+ in ARR

Senior Member technical staff

Engineering leader with proven track record of building world class teams, culture and development of distributed and scalable micro services powering enterprise SaaS products and AI infrastructure services
Highly effective in hiring top talent, cross functional leadership in forming guiding principles, aligning on strategy and vision to achieve business results.
Successfully led teams through all stages of software development life cycle: contributing to product strategy, competitive analysis, improving customer engagement and establishing right engineering systems, processes and culture
Experience leader driving a multi-functional team with/without authority, while fostering excellence and continuous process improvement.

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