Driving a car in the streets of Troy, New York, Nivruti Rai was overcome with a feeling of accomplishment, of having shattered a barrier. It was not because she was driving back from a successful job interview or after having launched another pathbreaking product for Intel; it was the simple act that she was driving a car.
Rai is the country head of Intel in India and vice president of Intel Foundry Services. After a long stint at Intel in the U.S., she is now based in Bengaluru, India, though she spends most of her time traveling between Intel offices in India and the U.S.
A Love for Lucknow
The simple feat of driving a car was unimaginable for a girl born in Gorakhpur and raised in Lucknow, both relatively small towns in India. In the past, only men drove cars. For her, this simple activity was like stepping into a male domain, which conjured a triumphant sentiment in the heart of the young girl, far away from her native place.
While in the U.S., oceans away from the life of small-town India, Rai was – and still is – absolutely passionate about Lucknow, the city of nawabs where she grew up and earned her university degree. She remembers the city fondly, saying, “It is such a special city for me. Every nook and corner has a story with me in it.”
Penchant for Poetry
During the interview, Rai switches between a technologist and a poet with ease to explain how she forged her own path in technology.
Using a line from the famous poet, Jigar Muradabadi, she compares her challenges and struggles as a woman in the industry: “Apna zamana hum aap banatey hain aye ahle dil; hum woh kahan jissey zamana bana gaya.” (Resolute hearts forge their own destiny; I am not of those forged by destiny.)
Finding Inspiration at Home to Forge a STEM Career
How did a woman who by her own admission has an equally creative brain become interested in STEM?
Rai credits her father as being a big influence in her academic and professional choices. She got her love of technology from her father, who possessed strong mathematical skills and was a rank-holder in the engineering entrance exam in his time. To prove to him that a daughter can do the same things that a son, she pursued a career in technology.
“To make my father happy and to fulfill some of his dreams, I continued studying mathematics and chose to be a technologist and an engineer,” she says.
The Quest for Solutions
Finding solutions to complex issues at work is a major part of Rai’s job profile. She talks about her mother as the one who inculcated in her the habit for finding solutions to all problems. A major influence in Rai’s career, she encouraged her to see the positive side in everything.
“My mom always lived on the solution side. If something was not working, she would always think of ways to make it work. She always had a solution to any adversity that fell on me, or us as a family.”
Rai on drawing inspiration
A Land of Learning and Love
Rai, who was studying in New York, moved to Oregon for love. The move was a result of her marriage to Sunit Tyagi, who worked for Intel at that time. A casual visit to her husband’s office was sufficient for her to decide that she would only work for Intel, even if there were more lucrative job offers on hand.
Getting into Intel is a dream for any engineer, but for Rai it served a dual purpose. It was while visiting her husband at Intel, walking the corridor with him wearing a visitor’s badge, that she closed her eyes and prayed for her visitor’s badge to turn into an employee’s badge.
She recalls, “I decided to move to Intel because my husband was already there. I had stars and love in my eyes, thinking that if I joined Intel, I could spend even my lunch and chai breaks with my husband. I will get those additional moments with him.”
Even after decades of marriage and two teenage children later, the love still endures. Rai took this interview in a hotel room while traveling with her husband. Tyagi was helping Rai to fix the lighting and set up the background, and the discomfort that he had to do turn technician was evident on Rai’s face. At one point, she got up and moved a cushion that needed to be moved rather than ask him to do it for her.
A Mistake That Catalyzed Success
After a career spanning continents and decades, Rai has had her fair share of challenges while moving up the corporate ladder within Intel. She shares an incident one such incident.
“I failed brilliantly once,” she says. “While making a product, we made a mistake while making a chip. It was not such a big mistake, because functionally, nothing was wrong. Perhaps in a million of those chips, one would not work. But … anybody who was a somebody at Intel was blaming us for that mistake.” Keeping her mother’s counsel in mind, Rai spent five months fixing the problem. Finally, she and her team succeeded.
The product went on to make more money than even the Intel’s initial projection, and Rai was singled out for her hard work before thousands of employees at an internal conference. That was the beginning of Rai’s rise in the world of technology.
“That feeling – I still have in my heart. Even now, I can feel the exhilaration that I felt. It was almost as pleasurable as the first time I saw the face of my children,” she says, beaming with pride. Taking a leaf from the experience, she came up with her own mantra which she still lives by even today: “Come what may, I will never fail.”
A Return to India
Moving from the U.S. to India was a life-changing moment for Rai and her family. In America, life had provided all that one could ask for, but Rai decided to move back home and pay it forward. She summarizes the experience: “From the lap of luxury, where there are no differences between wants and needs, to India, where I could clearly see what the needs of humanity were.”
In India, Rai is part of a very exclusive band of women leaders in the tech industry, and has now been at Intel for more than 27 years. She joined Intel in 1994 as a design engineer and moved to India as the Country Head in 2016. Her most notable contributions have been in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Paving the Way for Women at Work
As a woman in a leadership role, Rai is conscious of her responsibilities towards empowering her gender. She takes the role very seriously, even though the percentage of women in technology in India has risen by 10% in the last decade. She implores women not to consider their gender as an impediment. Rai says she often forgets her own gender at work and during meetings.
She explains, “Now, nothing matters to me. I don’t know which gender I am when I am working.” Her advice for women in the corporate world is to “take charge of their career, continue to create value and to be themselves.”
Rai’s rise at Intel and the journey to the C-Suite level is a beacon of hope and inspiration for countless women. Her journey conveys a message to them that a career should not be sacrificed at the altar of family responsibilities. She shattered the glass ceiling, balancing her role as a leader at work and a caregiver at home. Using her own experience, she recommends women pursuing leadership roles to be confident in their skin. She suggests, “They should not be swayed by people who talk. Let the noisemakers make noises. Remember, you don’t have to wear gray to show that gray matters. I do not have to dress up in a certain way to show that I matter.”
Mantra for Women
The dynamic world of technology demands an ever-evolving requirement to improve skill sets and to upgrade knowledge. Learning becomes a constant for a person to grow in this fast-paced career. Rai wants women to harness their power, like Moses who parted the sea. She feels women can accomplish whatever they set out to do, and that the key to success at work is to make learning a part of your commitment.
“Women can be the powerful force of water than can make its way through the mountain. Be yourself. Do not give up. Continue to sharpen your edge so that you can improve and be the value-creator. Align yourself to the job that you are responsible for, and work for a purpose.”
Nivruti Rai
Finding a Work-Life Balance
Technology and travel may consume Rai’s days and nights, but she does not consider work an energy-drainer. Asked how she recharges her batteries, she promptly responds that she does not really strive to do that.
Using the McKinsey quote that “Work-life balance is a myth,”, she says, “What matters is managing your energy. Finding what you absolutely love to do and is most important to you, everything else is a distraction.”
Passions Beyond Coding
Rai is not all about processors and microchips. She does have a couple of stressbusters she absolutely relies on. Falling back on the creative side of her brain, Rao finds time to do the little things in life that matter and energize her the most. An hour spent on embroidery or designing jewelry with a friend is all it takes for her to revitalize herself. Another quality she has inherited from her mother is the love for embroidery. The designs are examples of meticulous work in an area other than coding.
The chief of Intel India also has another love – cooking. Like embroidery and designing, she finds it another source of rejuvenation and also somewhat therapeutic. Not an image you would ordinarily link to the top boss of a tech company. However, it is in character, as a chat with her will reveal. Rai does not come across as an authoritarian figure, but is warm and polite.
All About the Kids
Besides her passion for coding and embroidery, her children are absolutely vital to Nivruti. Even with her busy calendar, she makes sure to find time for her now grown-up and working children. The older of the two, Rohan, is an alum of the University of California, while Sachi is a Stanford University graduate in computer science.
Rai’s maternal instincts do not have boundaries, and she also showers it on her team at Intel as well. She takes pride in her ability to transform the Indian office from a bunch of employees full of talent but low on confidence to a team going toe-to-toe with the best across the world. The very same confidence that she acquired, driving a car in America.
While the U.S. gave her the space to study and grow and become the person she is now, Rai now finds herself home – in India. She continues to be a stellar example of a woman on top of the pyramid, promoting economic growth and social change.
A woman who doesn’t need to wear gray, Nivruti Rai demonstrates she has enough gray matter, even if she is dressed in an embroidered outfit.
