Open Book: Sumedha Pramod
Hear about how Sumedha mixes all the right ingredients: in championing diverse teams, in building delightful user experiences, and in her custom cake side hustle.
Open Book is a series of interviews where you get to meet our Opendoor team members.
Hi Sumedha! What do you do at Opendoor?
I’m a front end engineer on the Seller Products team. Currently I’m working on our offer dashboard, which is how people explore their options to sell or list their home with Opendoor.
You and I both started out studying Biology in college. How did you go from Biology to Engineering?
I actually had no plans to be an engineer until my Junior year of college! My original plan was to study as a Mathematical Biology major and take the MCAT when I took a step back to evaluate my potential career path. I realized that the courses that I truly enjoyed were the computer science electives that I had taken. Was I really going to spend the next decade of my life studying a subject that I wasn’t truly passionate about? I quickly swapped around my course load and was able to declare a Computer Science major the next semester.
My decision to switch to Computer Science was validated even more when I was working on a more front end focused team at Box, Box Preview. I had never really written any formal Javascript before joining this team, but it was very quickly clear to me that I was in exactly the right place.
Now you’re one of the few specialized front end engineers at Opendoor, how did you end up going down this path?
I started out as a backend engineer. I built out document conversion systems and learned how to write complex Scala systems. While the work was interesting and challenging, I could tell that this wasn’t something that I was particularly passionate about. After about a year, I switched onto a more front end focused team and I knew there was no turning back.
I am a very visual person. Being able to see things drawn out really helps me gain a full understanding of what I’m working on. It’s also the most obvious difference between front end and back end engineering. I love that I get instant visual feedback on whether or not my code is correct. While tweaking CSS queries sometimes gets cumbersome, being able to rapidly prototype and build out different user experiences in React quickly became one of my favorite things about my day to day. In addition, front end technologies are constantly changing, so I’m constantly learning about the “hottest” new Javascript or React library.
Most recently at Opendoor, I’ve taken on more of a design role for one of our tooling products. It’s been an amazing learning experience for me (thank you to the Opendoor Design Team for being super patient with me :D) and I’ve found that I really enjoy delving into the user experience and designing visually intuitive experiences for them. It’s definitely unique to be in such a specialized front end role, however the seam between UI and design is really where my passions lie, and I’m so glad I was able to grow into this role at Opendoor.
You’re pretty involved with Opendoor’s Women in Tech group. Tell me more.
Women in tech is one of my biggest passions at work.
Until this year, I’ve never been on a team where the majority of engineers were women, which is just crazy. Having gone through a computer science program at a major university, I was already acutely aware of the gender discrepancies among programmers. I was often one of a handful of women in most of my programming classes — even the ones that had hundreds of students in them.
Right out of college, I started my first job at Box. I had just interned there the previous summer and had gotten to work and learn from all sorts of amazing people. I couldn’t have been more excited for my first day. When I started, I realized that the gender ratio on my team and the teams around me weren’t all that different from the gender ratios in most of my programming classes. Everyone on the team was extremely welcoming and friendly, but I couldn’t help but feeling like the odd woman out.
During my first week, I received a slew of welcome emails from the Women in Tech organization in addition to a few chocolates and an invite to grab coffee after I got settled in. This small, but very personal, touch made a huge impact on me. It was so nice to know that even if I was the only woman engineer on my team, there was a broader community within the company if I needed them. That experience has stuck with me throughout my career and I’ve worked hard to try and ensure that all engineers who identify as women are given a similarly warm welcome.
Since joining Opendoor, helping to grow our Women in Tech group has become a big focus for me within the company. In addition to taking Opendoor to our first ever Grace Hopper Celebration last year, I kicked off a Women in Tech book club where we read and discuss books by or about women and other minorities in technology. Some notable books we read recently were:
- “A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug: The Working Woman’s Guide to Overthrowing the Patriarchy” by Sarah Lacy
- “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” by Richard Rohtstein
- “Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing” by Claire L. Evans.
It’s been inspiring to have these open dialogues with people across the company and teaches me something new every day. I’m excited to help Opendoor continue to foster and grow their Women in Tech community!
I hear that I can order custom cakes from you! How did that happen? And are you taking orders right now? ;)
My mom has always been a master baker. She took a few cake decorating classes when I was a kid and slowly expanded her skillset from birthday cakes for me and my brother to baking wedding cakes for some of our family friends! When it became clear that I was going to be moving out to the Bay Area after graduation, she made it her mission to make sure that I was a competent cook. While this may surprise a lot of the people who know me, I was a pretty terrible cook, let alone baker. Over the course of a year, my mom not only taught me how to make all of my favorite South Indian dishes, but really piqued my interest in learning/experimenting more with food.
Five years ago, as a motivation to keep learning new things, I started a blog called Cooking in PJs with one of my childhood friends, and we’ve been documenting our culinary adventures ever since. I started off with some pretty rudimentary cakes, but in the last few years, all my cakes have become custom creations, and I’ve even started taking orders for specialty cakes! I especially love to experiment with fun flavor combinations, trying to recreate different flavor profiles from my favorite cocktails and treats in cake form. Some of my favorites concoctions have been an “Old Fashioned” inspired cake and a boozy bananas foster cake. Maybe one day I’ll be able to open my own little bakery! :)
2020 has been a strange year for all of us. How has life changed for you since the pandemic began?
The pandemic has definitely drastically altered my plan for the year. However, there was one especially exciting personal outcome of this pandemic… I became a first time home owner!
At the beginning of the pandemic, I started to re-evaluate my living arrangements. I decided to pack up all of my belongings into a storage unit and spend some time with my parents (and dog!) back in Michigan. It was great to reset and spend an extended amount of time with my family but after a few months I decided that it was time to head back to San Francisco. While browsing apartment rentals online, I started to casually browse for apartments that were also on sale. After a while, I found a listing that I instantly fell in love with. Not only that, the list price was actually within my budget! Fast forward to today and I’ve officially closed and moved into my new home.
It was very interesting and exciting to go through this process, especially since I work on the seller experience at Opendoor. It really was eye opening to personally go through the fairly archaic and manual process that I’ve always been told is a pain point for our customers. While I had a great agent guiding me through the process, it was still such an overwhelmingly complicated and scary experience and truly drove home the value of what Opendoor can provide to consumers in the real estate space.
And now I finally have a chance to put all those years of watching home design and DIY shows on TV to use in my very own home! ;)
P.S. If you liked what you read and are interested in learning more, check out our jobs page! We’re always hiring.
