Startup Stories: Founding Engineer at Leda Shweta Shrivastava Shares Mission to Support Sexual Assault Survivors through Digital Technology
“I first joined Leda as an intern to develop one of our digital platforms. My involvement quickly grew to me eventually joining full-time as the first software engineer. I was moved by Leda’s mission to support survivors of sexual assault and increase access to care and autonomy in their healing journey.” Today’s woman dreamer, Shweta Shrivastava is a Founding Engineer at Leda Health, with a passion for empowering women in technology. In her interview with Women Who Win, Shweta shares how she navigated her role at Leda and writing the code in a scalable, secure, and robust way, and advice to young women looking to break into the technology and entrepreneurship space.
You are the Founding Engineer at Leda Health, a startup supporting Sexual Assault Survivors with Early Evidence Kits and a 24/7 Care Team. Tell us more about your journey with Leda, and what you have learned.
I first joined Leda as an intern to develop one of our digital platforms. My involvement quickly grew to me eventually joining full-time as the first software engineer. I was moved by Leda’s mission to support survivors of sexual assault and increase access to care and autonomy in their healing journey.
In my time at Leda, I have expanded my knowledge of cloud technologies (AWS) and full-stack web development, how to prioritize engineering goals based on business needs, and scope out new technologies that would support and improve our products.
To date, I have developed and launched 2 of our 3 digital platforms from scratch, and now oversee the tech behind our mobile application to guide our offshore team in India. Most recently I have been leading the company, with support from the CTO, Liesel Vaidya, on becoming HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant.
Working at the company has not only advanced my technical skills and professional career but also my understanding of society, justice, healing, and care.
2. Having been with Leda from the early days, what would you say was one of the challenges you faced? What did you learn from it?
Being the sole software engineer on the team meant all code that I wrote had to be scalable, robust, secure, and follow industry standards. I learned how to not only write good code but also do secure code reviews, and regression and unit testing. It is easy to fall into the trap of writing scrappy, unscalable code that gets the job done, especially in environments that require functional products ASAP. I learned to pause, evaluate, and balance speed to production for MVP with potential future requirements.
3. Your background is in software engineering, and you received your Master's from NYU. What is your advice to women looking to work in the social tech/entrepreneurship space?
Social tech is huge. Find a cause you’re motivated to solve in any circumstance or environment. Even in the uncertainties and difficult moments, empowering sexual assault survivors through Leda pushes me to keep showing up to work every day.
What’s also important is to take a break every now and then. There will be good days and bad days - the trick is to remember that this too shall pass.
4. As the platform for women dreamers, is there an empowered woman in your life that you admire?
My mother. She’s headstrong, self-motivated, and fiercely independent. She graduated with her Master's degree last year while also working full-time. She’s always pushed me to dream bigger and work for those dreams while also giving me reality checks and keeping me humble. She has supported my career choices and given me the freedom to explore my own path to success, be it moving to another state in India for undergrad or to Taiwan and US for research and grad school. My mother let me make my own mistakes but taught me how to rise and learn from them. I’m proudly a mini-version of my mom.
Thank you Shweta for sharing your inspiring story with us! We are excited to have you in our global women’s network!
Bio: Shweta is a Founding Engineer at Leda Health. She has worked in the core engineering teams of different B2B SaaS, EdTech, and HealthTech startups building out the product vision and implementing best practices for engineering teams. She currently works on software engineering, cloud technologies, compliance, and IT and strives to work on projects big or small, that not only challenge her professional skills but also help her empower more women in tech.