Engineering leader. Mother of two. Compulsive gardener. I spend my days building teams that ship hard things — and figuring out the human stuff that makes that possible. I solve problems in code, in org design, in soil, and occasionally in feelings.
I’m not a writer. I just have thoughts that won’t leave me alone, so I put them somewhere. That somewhere is here →
I started at Workday in 2014 and grew into the management roles I have now. The arc reads cleaner than it lived.
Zero regressions on one of Workday’s biggest releases. An ML team built from nothing that shipped in year one. The first agentic RAG system at Workday — built in 2023, before anyone had a playbook for it, because no org chart approved it but everyone needed it. A month in Dublin. A summit that turned scattered agendas across the org into one shared direction. The through-line on all of it: get the conditions right and people surprise you.
Automation engineer first — writing test infrastructure before I fully understood what I was testing. Then into software development, owning features and technical design. Then management: Enterprise Frameworks, then Workday Student, then the ML team I built from scratch inside it. Each step made sense only in hindsight.
My head is always in the garden — what to sow, what to harvest, how to help this plant, how to grow this person. I grew up deciding the menu based on what the garden gave. I know no other way. The smell of soil is still my reset button.
Active in Women at Workday. Mentor across teams. I judge hackathons when I can — partly because I enjoy watching people build under pressure, mostly because it’s the best way to see how someone thinks when the stakes are low and the energy is high. Spoiler: the ones who ask the most questions usually win.
Mother of two — the seedlings above are named after them — which has done more to refine my management style than any leadership program I’ve attended. A toddler will give you feedback no 360 survey ever will.
The gardening lens and the management lens are the same lens, honestly. You read the environment, you work with what’s actually there, and you play the long game.
Workday
Still figuring out what the "Sr." means. Mostly it means the problems got bigger.
Workday
Built the ML team from scratch while also owning the systems that determine whether students get their financial aid on time. The stakes keep you very, very honest.
Workday
Led the Org Chart team. Turns out building the product that visualises everyone else's reporting structure makes you think very carefully about your own.
Workday
First management role. Learned very quickly that managing engineers is nothing like being one. Also learned that's the fun part.
Workday
Grew into full ownership — technical design, scrum mastering, and a zero-regression obsession that still defines how I think about quality.
Workday
Wanted more challenges. Got more challenges. Moved deeper into feature development and never looked back.
Workday
Where the Workday journey started. Wrote tests before I fully understood what I was testing — turns out that's a great way to learn a codebase fast.
Peel
Shipped Android apps at a TV remote control startup. Yes, that was a real thing. It was genuinely great.
San Francisco · Palo Alto · Hyderabad
QA, internships, early chaos. Everyone starts somewhere.
Started from zero: no team, no infra, no priors. Hired and coached the core group, set the operating system (experimentation framework, data validation, review gates), and partnered across Product/Eng/Legal on where ML belongs inside a regulated product. The win wasn’t the models; it was trust, velocity, and a repeatable way to ship safely.
Led a platform team building frameworks consumed across multiple Workday products. Org Chart was the visible surface; the leadership work was the system underneath: shared standards, adoption plans, and data-driven OKRs that raised quality without performance theater. Built alignment first, then shipped durable leverage.
Drove a platform-wide shift: make quality a property of architecture, not an output of QA. Built reusable automation, regression heatmaps, and pre-release gates, but the durable change was cultural: design reviews that assumed failure modes up front and teams that owned quality as a first-class product requirement.
Orchestrated an internal ML summit end-to-end — program, speakers, narrative, exec alignment. It wasn’t a conference; it was an operating mechanism: get engineers across the org aligned on a shared vocabulary, risk posture, and the product and engineering decisions that actually matter before the chaos of scaling ML inside the product.
Embedded in Dublin to unblock a newly formed geo team: built the onboarding curriculum, ran live architecture sessions, and mentored engineers 1:1. The outcome wasn’t a training deck; it was a collaboration pattern that reduced dependency thrash and helped the new team ship independently.
I think about teams the way I think about gardens. You can’t pull a plant upward to make it grow faster. You can only fix the soil, manage the light, clear the weeds — and then step back. The plant does the rest. The best teams don’t need you every day. They need the right conditions.
“Fix the soil, not the plant.”
The teams I’ve built report high trust, high clarity, low escalation, and the kind of retention you only get when people actually want to be there. None of that is a vibe. It’s the outcome of deliberate decisions about how meetings run, how decisions get documented, and how we treat each other when something breaks. Especially when something breaks.
I learned this the hard way: the first time I tried to fix a struggling team by pushing harder on individuals, it didn’t work. The second time, I fixed the meeting structure, the on-call rotation, and the way we wrote RFCs. It worked immediately. The team hadn’t changed — the noise had.
My north star: heart, hustle, and humor. The heart keeps the work human. The hustle gets things done. The humor keeps everyone sane when the sprint goes sideways. And the sprint always goes sideways.
Opinions, arguments, and the occasional structured rant. Mostly about engineering teams, AI, and quality — but I reserve the right to go off-topic.
May 2026
AI 10x'd what there is to read. Your eyeballs did not get a 10x. Congratulations, you're the bottleneck now.
May 2026
The interview hasn't figured that out yet.
May 2026
Token usage isn't it. Lines of code never was. Seven measurable signals that actually tell you who can ship — and who's just orchestrating chaos.
3 posts so far. More incoming.
Best way to reach me: maanasavamsi09@gmail.com. Also on LinkedIn and GitHub.
I’m not actively job-hunting, but I read every email and reply to most. If you’re a student or early-career engineer, my reply rate is even higher.
Happy to talk engineering leadership, AI in enterprise, growing things in the Bay Area (plants or teams), or parenting with zero answers and full honesty.