In this series, we take you behind the scenes of what it’s like to be part of Team Temasek. Hear why we love doing what we do from interns who have learnt the ropes, mid-career joiners who have made the switch from other industries, and those who have risen within our ranks.
Brindha Devi’s job today bears little resemblance to what she was hired to do just five years ago.
“As an organisation, we are constantly evolving,” says Temasek’s technology lawyer, who joined the Legal & Regulatory team in 2018 to help drive the company’s digital transformation. “From an investment perspective, there are always new and emerging areas; on the technology front, we are looking at new defences and new vendors. There is a constant need to pivot.
“What I was recruited to do is maybe 15% of what I do now.”
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Then an Associate Director with Temasek’s L&R team, Brindha began her career ploughing through the nitty gritty of contracts, including for the software and platforms that Temasek was looking to deploy.
The fundamentals for the company’s massive digital shift were put into place fairly quickly, “but cloud computing, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies kept changing the business landscape – and Temasek changed with it,” she says.
As the company continued to integrate newer technologies, and bridge business and technological possibilities, Brindha found herself moving into a more strategic role, keeping a close eye on these quickly developing technologies, and figuring out what information went into them, how they were being used and by who, what could go wrong, and how this impacted compliance and risk.
It did not help that in most instances, the technologies were changing faster than standard playbooks could be developed.
“When it comes to newer technologies like generative AI, there aren’t a lot of laws in place, so when our business units wanted to deploy the enterprise version of ChatGPT, we stepped in and helped them navigate the potential risks. In other areas, like cybersecurity, sometimes all you have to go on is what other people get wrong,” says Brindha, now a Vice President with the department.
“Evolution really has been the name of the game. I went from handling contracts to looking at how we could leverage large language models (LLMs). But that’s what I love about technology – and being at Temasek – it’s never static.”
In the rapidly changing world of tech, Temasek’s strong cross-functional focus and culture of learning has proved indispensable. “I like that I am constantly learning, and the company supports us with training and other opportunities to do so,” she says.
She leaned on available training options to get her certification in the fundamentals of cybersecurity and seized opportunities to attend various forums and seminars, presenting her insights as a subject-matter expert, while also learning from her peers.
In 2022, she spent half a year shadowing the investment lawyers within the L&R team to understand where she could add value across the company’s investment life-cycle. More recently, she was seconded to a law firm to get a first-hand look at actual cases involving cybersecurity risks and breaches – an idea she suggested, and got her managers’ buy-in on.
“It has been a period of intense growth, and the team has rallied around me, working around my schedule and availability. My ability to gain that knowledge was a group effort,” she says.
Today, Brindha remains the only dedicated technology lawyer in the Legal and Regulatory department, providing legal guidance for both the technology Temasek deploys and some of the technology-related platforms it sets up. She works alongside other functions within the department, such as Compliance, as well as with dedicated teams that Temasek now has in areas like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
Her role sometimes comes with a side order of having to play “tech support”, she laughs. “I think that's an unfortunate by-product of being known as ‘a technology person’ – people expect you can help when their computers don’t work the way they are supposed to.”
Her five years at Temasek is the longest Brindha has spent in any single organisation since graduating in 2009 – and there’s no desire to look elsewhere for the next challenge.
“What I like most about Temasek is that it is constantly reinventing [itself] so you don’t feel like you’ll… stop growing after a certain point. If I went to my bosses tomorrow and said I wanted to learn about technology investments, they would find a way to make it happen. There’s room for me to chart a career for myself.
That’s why I don’t see a ceiling here – I only see opportunities.
