Ep. 15 | Authenticity in Career and Life Design with Sneha Koka

In this conversation, Sara sits down with Sneha Koka to talk about authenticity in leadership and in life.

Sneha opens up about her journey as an engineer, a leader, and a mom, offering a thoughtful glimpse into how she balances these roles. She shares how embracing honesty about her needs and desires—combined with an engineering mindset for solving everyday challenges—has empowered her to build a life she truly enjoys. Sneha also reflects on how her diverse background and experiences have shaped her ability to show up authentically in every aspect of her life. 

About Sneha:

Sneha Koka is a leader in the operations organization at Nvidia with previous experience as a manufacturing engineer at Tesla during the Model 3 launch and at Linde and Caterpillar prior to that. She leads the capacity planning team at Nvidia, ensuring capacity risk mitigation strategies are in place across all verticals post-fab. Her background is in industrial engineering and she has spent about fifteen years tackling complex challenges in dynamic business environments in multiple industries – semiconductor, automotive and chemical. Her recent challenges in the silicon valley have been focused on implementing solutions to enable exponential scalability.

Outside of work, she’s a mom of two young boys, two and four. For fun, she loves biking with her family, hiking/exploring nature in their camper van and doing pottery on the wheel. Sneha loves to create - creating art, creating solutions and creating new memories/experiences is something she thrives on. Sneha also loves to bring people together.

Someone once congratulated Sneha on becoming a mom, with the statement “welcome to the world’s largest fraternity/sorority”. Sneha became a mom for the first time during the Covid 19 pandemic; a time when many parents started to leave the workforce as a result of losing their standard support systems they relied on. Sneha continued to take on bigger challenges at work while intentionally looking to grow in her personal life.

Always having been a lover of nature and the outdoors, Sneha leaned into that aspect of her life even as a new parent and found ways to incorporate outdoor adventures into her family’s routine. A friend told her that following Sneha’s outdoor adventures was inspiring her to come up with innovative ways to balance both work and family time. This in turn inspired Sneha share her outdoor nature explorations & van life on the weekends, hoping to inspire more parents to find creative ways to meet their goals holistically and not have to step away from professional goals unless it’s truly what they wanted to do.