Sugeeta Bhanoo | APAC Head of Capabilities, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence
Sugee is BAE AI’s APAC Head of Capabilities overseeing 480 staff across Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. With over 17 years of experience in telecommunications and defence industries coupled together with her MBA research on global virtual team inefficiencies, she has a deep understanding of the R&D challenges in a global and local context.
Prior to joining BAE, Sugee was the first female Head of R&D of a 62-member software development and testing team in Nokia Solutions & Networks (NSN) . This team played a significant role in developing and maintaining the world’s largest Subscriber Data Management solution (2.2 billion subscribers). She also has extensive experience managing offshoring and building new teams for start-up (Apertio) and multi-national companies (Motorola, NSN, BAE Systems).
Sugee is an electronics engineer by training – B.Eng in Electronics Majoring in Computer to be exact, and she remembers the days in university when she was one of the few women in a class dominated by male classmates. By the time she graduated, the IT industry was booming in Malaysia and she felt her engineering background would be a natural fit for the software engineer role. Her background in engineering has influenced the way she thinks and helped her throughout her career.
Sugee started off her career as a graduate trainee in Motorola shortly after graduation. After 1 and a half years, she went on to become the technical lead for a test team of 60 before moving on to a project manager role. That was the start of her career in leadership and she continued on that path. She took a short break to start a family and embark on the most important role she’s held to date – the role of a mother. As a leader, it has always been a privilege and honour for her to be the voice of the lesser heard and play a significant role in ensuring they were represented.
