Sandberg served as chief operating officer (COO) of Meta Platforms, a position from which she stepped down in August 2022.

[5] Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org.

Before that, Sandberg served as research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank, and subsequently as his chief of staff when he was Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury.

[7] On Forbes Magazine's 2021 billionaires list, Sandberg is reported to have a net worth of US$1.7 billion, due to her stock holdings in Facebook and in other companies.

[2][13] Her father is an ophthalmologist, while her mother, a college professor of French, has roots tracing back to Belarus, as her grandparents were immigrants from there..[11][14] Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was two years old.

[19] Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank,[11] where she worked for approximately one year on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.

[21] After graduating from business school in the spring of 1995, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company for approximately one year (1995–1996).

From 1996 to 2001 she again worked for Lawrence Summers, who was then serving as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, as his chief of staff.

Sandberg assisted in the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis.

[24] In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig.

[11] Zuckerberg had no formal search for a Chief Operating Officer (COO), but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role.

[28] The New York Times published a report in 2018 detailing Sandberg's role in handling Facebook's public relations after revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and its Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

[10] In January 2025, vice chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court J. Travis Laster imposed sanctions on Sandberg for deleting emails from her personal account related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal.

In 2008, Sandberg wrote an article for The Huffington Post in support of her mentor, Larry Summers, who was under fire for his comments about women.

[42] In 2015, she signed an open letter which the ONE Campaign had been collecting signatures for; the letter was addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urging them to focus on women as they serve as the head of the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa respectively, which will start to set the priorities in development funding before a main UN summit in September 2015 that will establish new development goals for the generation.

Sandberg released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-authored by Nell Scovell and published by Knopf on March 11, 2013.

[53] Sandberg claims there are also barriers that women create for themselves through internalizing systematic discrimination and societal gender roles.

Sandberg argues that in order for change to happen women need to break down these societal and personal barriers by striving for and achieving leadership roles.

[54]Criticism of the book includes claims that Sandberg is "too elitist" and another that she is "tone-deaf" to the struggles faced by the average woman in the workplace.

"[58] Sandberg mentions both of these issues in the introduction of her book, stating that she is "acutely aware that the vast majority of women are struggling to make ends meet and take care of their families"[59] and that her intention was to "offer advice that would have been useful long before I had heard of Google or Facebook.

Several video spots with spokespersons including Beyoncé, Jennifer Garner, and Condoleezza Rice among others were produced along with a web site providing school training material, leadership tips, and an online pledge form to which visitors can promise not to use the word.

[77] Sandberg also raised the issue of single parenting conflicting strongly with professional and economic development in America.

[78] On May 1, 2015, Dave Goldberg died unexpectedly, and his death was originally reported as resulting from sustaining a head trauma falling from a treadmill while the couple was vacationing in Mexico.

[82] According to an April 21, 2022, report by The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order towards Kotick by a former girlfriend in 2014.