Anshuman Srivastava - Class of 2000

Overlake turns out a fair number of students who become software engineers, but not many of those students get to work in markets like retail, healthcare, and even our government and the judicial system. With a long career across many industries, Anshuman Srivastava (’00) is currently the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Axon Enterprises, a leading tech company in public safety. “In my current role, I lead software engineering teams with a goal to expand beyond public safety agencies, building new products to target markets,” shares Anshuman who has been working at Axon for a decade and claims there’s “never a dull moment.” 

For Anshuman, what drives him is the problem solving. A clear nod back to his background as an Overlake student where his curiosity and creativity were cultivated, Anshuman loves to “get into the weeds” with his engineers and product leaders to ensure that they are “building high quality software that solves customer problems.” And those problems are sometimes life or death as Axon Enterprises invented the TASER conducted electrical weapon and is leading the market in body worn cameras and software and mobile apps that support public safety.  

But all his technical skills cannot exist in a vacuum as software engineering is “in many ways a social job” because of the level of teamwork involved in building software solutions. Anshuman notes that the Overlake humanities courses taught him to write and communicate effectively, “Learning how to structure complex essays to lay out a coherent thesis and argument, providing deep analysis, and having the diligence to do the research have all served me well in how I communicate even today,” further adding that “As an engineering leader, I spend more of my time on written and verbal communication, laying out technical strategies for my organization or driving initiatives that impact other teams, and being a good communicator has also made me a more effective thinker.” 

Anshuman has been living in London for the last two years helping Axon build a new software engineering center and returned to Seattle in the summer of 2024. When he isn’t busy spending time with his family (daughter Ananya just started sixth grade at Overlake this year) or working at Axon, Anshuman loves to read and play video games, the latter of which he credits with sparking his love of computer science. When thinking back to his favorite memories from Overlake, Anshuman fondly recalls the simple moments of “hanging out with friends during free block while talking – not too loudly – in the library and catching up on homework,” painting a picture of Overlake that rang as true in 2000 as it does today.