Sandeep Kumar

Welcome to Second Order Labs. I am Sandeep Kumar, a software engineer living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working at Meta on WhatsApp Growth. My work is centered on building and scaling mobile experiences that reach people across the world. Over the past several years I have helped shape projects in messaging, commerce, and payments, always with the aim of making technology more useful in daily life.

My path began far from Silicon Valley. I grew up in Bokaro Steel City, Jharkhand, where I learned the value of perseverance, community, and steady progress. Those lessons stayed with me as I moved from Samsung, where I built multimedia applications for flagship smartphones, to NVIDIA, where I worked on game streaming for Android devices, and eventually to Meta. Along the way I earned a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor’s degree from NIT Jamshedpur.

Away from work my greatest joy comes from family. My wife Smita and I are raising our daughter Reeva, whose presence reshapes my sense of purpose every single day. Family keeps me grounded and reminds me that the most meaningful work is measured not only by scale but also by the lives it touches.

Through Second Order Labs, I write about how products grow. I study how some of the most influential companies made key choices that turned simple ideas into products used around the world. Writing is my way of reflecting, learning, and sharing those lessons with others who are curious about the craft of building.

I see myself as both a learner and a builder, someone shaped by roots in Bokaro, guided by engineering, and inspired by family.