For our 2022 Rising Stars, Fierce Wireless focused on the top U.S. operators. We’ve compiled a slate of impressive up-and-coming executives in the wireless industry from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Dish. Interestingly, four of our Rising Stars this year started their careers through internal leadership development programs. We’re featuring the profiles of these executives, aged 35 or younger, this week, and we hope you enjoy reading them. These are all folks to keep an eye on as they make a mark in wireless.
Leena Peters would have missed the chance to work for Verizon if not for a college friend, who encouraged the mechanical engineering major to drop a resume at the mobile operator’s booth at a career fair. That resume led to an internship, which earned Peters an offer to join Verizon’s Leadership Development Program.
The program has taken Peters through a series of rotations at Verizon, including network engineering, implementation, RF performance, data/switch engineering, and network operations in several markets in the Northeast. Peters was eventually promoted to operations supervisor in Boston.
Peters’ first day in her new role was April 15, 2013. After a tour and some introductions, her boss let her off early and told her to go enjoy that day’s Boston Marathon. But on her way home, Peters heard about the bombing on the radio and raced back to work. She knew her team would be working to repair the network.
“We stayed there until midnight,” Peters remembers. “I was new to the team, so really I was moral support.”
A year later Peters was on the ground with her team, checking and double checking Cells on Wheels (COWS) to prepare for the 2014 Boston Marathon. She remembers COWS by law enforcement vans and by the finish line, and walking the course at 6:00 am to make sure coverage was good. “It was an eerie feeling,” she said. Along with the tension of the situation came the realization that her role was no longer deployment, but oversight and management.
Peters’ leadership skills took her next to Philadelphia, where she led the team that built a distributed antenna system (DAS) on Benjamin Franklin Parkway to prepare for the 2015 visit of Pope Francis. In addition to managing the RF issues, Peters got to use her mechanical engineering background, since the team had to create exact replicas of the light poles along the parkway to camouflage the antennas. Peters notes that other operators have since joined the DAS, but Verizon remains the anchor carrier.
After spending seven years on the network side of the business, Peters made the move to product. “I am always one trying to learn something new,” she said. “When I heard about the opportunity to move to product, I raised my hand and went over as an individual contributor. We were a team of three. Even though I was going from management to individual contributor, I was able to learn new things faster.” Within seven months the team launched Safe Wi-Fi, now part of the Verizon Protect Bundle.
But Peters missed working directly with technology and reached out to her Verizon mentors to find her next opportunity. She landed with Nicola (Nicki) Palmer, then CTO at Verizon, who gave her 90 days to improve the operator’s device certification process by working with partners.
Next, Peters was invited to apply for her current position, senior DevOps manager. Her team is responsible for managing the cloud infrastructure for Verizon’s consumer and business products, producing more than $50 million in annual revenue.
DevOps is also responsible for significant cost savings, Peters said. She explained the team has cut Verizon’s costs by $2 million this year, primarily by moving workloads to the cloud.
Peters said her team uses AWS as well as Verizon’s private cloud, adding that DevOps enables Verizon’s growing mobile edge compute business, as well as cloud-based implementation of private networks and Verizon Visa.
Peters is already thinking about the next generation of leaders. She volunteers as a math tutor for Boston Partners in Education and as a mentor for #BuiltbyGirls. The large percentage of girls who lose interest in science concerns her, and she hopes to counteract that trend by increasing the overall number of girls in STEM. “We need to start younger,” she said “so we have a bigger pool.”