Kirthiga Reddy – Director of Online Operations and Head of Office India, Facebook India

Kirthiga Reddy is the director of Online Operations and Head of Office India at Facebook India. In her current role, Reddy heads Facebook’s operations in India, supporting the company’s growing number of users, advertisers and developers worldwide who are capitalising on Facebook’s global service to foster relationships with people and reach out to new customers locally and internationally. Prior to Facebook, Reddy was VP and GM of the Consumer Security business unit and India operations at Phoenix Technologies (NASDAQ: PTEC)

She led a global team located in US, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Before Phoenix, Reddy was with Motorola Good Technology for over six years. She was based out of Silicon Valley where she led global product management. She moved to India a year after Good Technology’s acquisition by Motorola to lead the cross-functional Good India team. Reddy has also held the position of director of Engineering at Silicon Graphics and associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. Reddy holds an MBA from Stanford University, where she graduated with top honours, an MS in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a BE in Computer Science from Ambedkar University, India. She is passionate about children’s causes and in developing women leaders. She was named  India Today’s top 25 influential Indian professional women of 2011 and Business Today’s  hottest young executives 2011

She has redefined Facebook's mantra of staying connected. In just three years, Kirthiga Reddy has moved from being a casual user of this globally popular social networking medium to depending on it to stay connected with family and friends in another country, to building its operations in India from the ground up. In July 2010, Reddy, found herself in her "dream come true job" when she joined Facebook as its first employee in India.

Reddy had earlier been with well-known companies such as Silicon Graphics and Motorola. At Silicon Graphics, she was the youngest director of engineering and the only woman in this role in her team. Reddy was the first in her family to get a technical and business degree in the United States. She holds a master's in business administration from Stanford University and an M.S. in computer engineering from Syracuse University.

In fact, in her first job in the US, at Silicon Graphics, then a $2-billion company, she surprised her manager when she did not allow herself to be restricted to her job description, and instead did "what was needed for the company". At a software project with which she was involved, she went beyond her job and played a larger role, starting from defining the product and its interfaces.

She has big plans at Facebook. She wants to see the India operations as one of Facebook's global centres of excellence five years from now.