Wendy Wang started her journey at Rubrik about 2 years ago after working at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for over 9 years. Looking for a change of pace, Wendy joined the Rubrik rocket ship as Director of Engineering and fearlessly leads her teams as they work on product features that delight our customers and help them secure their data from modern cybersecurity threats like ransomware.
Wendy has also been instrumental as a mentor in the Women@Rubrik mentorship program, helping to guide and develop others in that community. Wendy has a fantastic story to tell as a female engineering leader that has inspired countless others to drive their own impact here at Rubrik. Let’s learn a little more about her story…
Q: Before coming to Rubrik, you were at a startup that got acquired by HPE. How did that experience change your career trajectory?
A: Leaving a larger company like HPE presented a lot of opportunities for learning and growth. There were a lot of changes at the organization I worked at after the acquisition. Besides the typical HR/IT integration, there was also organizational restructuring and expansion as HPE had increased our research and development spending and intended to grow our product line to cover broader market segments.
Every change is an opportunity, they say. At the encouragement of the then head of Software Engineering, I changed my career track and moved from a software technical lead to becoming the manager of a firmware team that was responsible for developing BIOS and onboard hardware monitoring firmware. The team frequently collaborated with multiple teams across hardware and software during the initial product design, and subsequent hardware brings up and qualification process. I thoroughly enjoyed the role and have continued my career growth in management ever since.
Q: Why did you decide to join Rubrik?
A: After a healthy career advancement and a lot of personal growth at HPE, I was looking for new challenges and opportunities. I wanted to learn different technologies and how other successful companies operate. When talking with several companies, I really liked Rubrik. It was in an adjacent space where I could leverage my previous enterprise system software engineer experience to help advance Rubrk’s mission to secure the world’s data and yet learn new technologies. The people on the interview panel were talented and energetic. The company and product had a lot of growth potential. So I decided to join Rubrik in the very early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Q: You said that you see yourself as more of an enabler than a manager for your teams. What does that mean to you?
A: At Rubrik, “excellence” is one of our RIVET values and excellence is certainly what our engineering team delivers. With the right tools and support, they have achieved amazing accomplishments. My role is to help them connect the dots between their goals with company strategy and customer needs, empower them to take ownership and create action plans, and then remove any roadblocks so together we can execute and deliver the intended results.
Q: What has been the most fulfilling project you've worked on at Rubrik?
A: In the last two years at Rubrik, I’ve worked with the teams on many product features that help customers to protect their virtual environment or file system better and perform recovery operations with ease. They range from VMware InPlaceRecovery to NetApp SnapMirror support. VMware In-Place-Recovery was conceptualized in one of our annual Hackathons, and the team took it through proof-of-concept, and eventually delivered it as a product to customers’ delight in less than a year.
Another fulfilling project I worked on at Rubrik was the Women@Rubrk mentorship program. Soon after joining Rubrik, I was approached by Vinitha Varadarajan, Sr. Director of Information Security, to join the program as one of the mentors. The program was very well put together. In seven sessions that included pre-read, pre-work, and live discussion, it covered a broad range of topics from gender bias in the workplace, to developing leadership, to career advancement. A pair of mentors worked together and led their small group through the sessions. It was such a rewarding experience to network with other women at Rubrik, share my own lessons, and help others develop.
Q: Which RIVET value do you identify with the most?
A: Excellence. I believe in continuous improvement in whatever we do, our product, tools, or process. Our industry is very fast-paced. We need to constantly learn new technologies, build new skills, and improve the way we execute, both at a personal level but also as an engineering organization in order to be successful in this industry.
Q: What excites you most about the work your teams are currently doing?
A: My teams are working on some of the key strategic Rubrik initiatives recently announced in Rubrik FORWARD. The projects range from protecting data center objects running on Kubernetes, to enabling Rubrik Data Protection customers to protect their hypervisors and NAS objects.
Last but not least, along with sister teams, we are working hard to enable ransomware attack detection and recovery for hypervisor customers. What excites me the most is that every team member’s work directly benefits our customers.
Rapid-fire Questions
Q: First job?
A: Unix Kernel developer in NFS/Networking at DG/EMC. One of my first projects as an intern was to write an NFSv3 protocol decoder for network traffic snooping and parsing tools. So I know the NFS protocol really well.
Q: Favorite hobby?
A: Badminton. I play regularly and hope we can form a Rubrik team to play in the Bay Area Corporate Badminton Challenge when it resumes in 2023.
Q: Dream vacation?
A: Watching the northern lights from Ice Igloos at Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort in Finland
Q: Last movie you watched?
A: Everything Everywhere All at Once. I can definitely empathize with Evelyn, a working mom with so many things to do.
Come Help us Explore the Next Frontier in Cybersecurity
Data security is the next frontier in cybersecurity. For too long, organizations have focused solely on infrastructure and network security, forgetting about their greatest asset: their data. At Rubrik, you have the opportunity to join our team and make a tangible difference in our data security products and solutions. Come join us to drive innovation through curiosity.