Joshwini Pereira's story

I am Joshwini Pereira and I have been at LinkedIn for 2 years. I am a Sr.Manager leading the Metadata Engineering space in Core Eng and I co-lead the WIT Invest program. I am from India and grew up in Mysore, a small and beautiful historic city in the southern part of India. I ended up choosing a career in engineering all thanks to my older brother who paved the way by graduating as a computer science student. My brother was a true geek in the sense that he used to be holed up in his room designing and programming new games. He got me to be his personal game tester and would continue to tweak his game until the machine became the master by winning every single game against me. This early exposure definitely piqued my intellectual curiosity along with shallow stories of Computer science being a lucrative career choice :)I went to an Engineering school (NITK Surathkal) with only a 10% representation of women. Though we were a minority, the women were clear powerhouses - topping various courses, securing high paying jobs all the while standing head to head with their male peers running various committees and organizing events. The female classmates and seniors were clearly my inspiration during my early years. During my undergrad, I did pretty well in my practical/programming labs. Computer science felt like a complex puzzle and the thrill of seeing your program spit out the right output kept me hooked onto the subject. Upon graduation, I worked for a year at Intel, and then moved to the States to pursue my Masters in Computer Science from Stony Brook. Upon graduating from my Masters, I joined Bloomberg in NYC. I worked on very interesting problems that involved building real time information extraction, high scale distributed systems for extracting financial data from text documents (email, chat, pdf, excel etc.). This was a novel problem that required solving the problem across several dimensions and kept me excited about coming into work everyday. I was tapped pretty early on to become a team lead and I was the only female engineer/lead in a team of 15+ people. A similar trend continued when I moved to Amazon and finally to LinkedIn - where I observed that women leaders tend to be a minority in the room. Even though I saw this gender disparity at my workplace, I never felt alone - I had amazing bosses and peers who constantly encouraged and advocated for me. I felt seen, challenged and supported throughout.The allure of problem solving, be it technical or organizational, kept me engaged.

My mantra is - if you start to feel uncomfortable, then you are learning something new. If the discomfort lasts too long, then you are doing something wrong. Thankfully, I have been uncomfortable frequently (and thankfully not for too long!) that always kept me engaged while working on the different problem spaces. I have worked on large scale distributed systems, high throughput applications, led teams to explore and adopt ML solutions, high scale multi-tenant infra platforms and everything in between. Every problem has been novel, exciting where I had an opportunity to learn a lot from my leaders, peers and teams around.

While not techies, I take great strength from my grandmother, my mom and my mother in law who have been tough women throughout and who stayed on course to achieve what they set out to do. I also believe having a solid partner makes a huge difference in how you approach problems or when signing up to take on bigger and better challenges. I am again very fortunate to have a very supportive spouse who is my biggest fan, who inspires me everyday and constantly encourages me to push myself. I am a mom to two energetic and loving boys (age 10 and 6.5) and also a mom to 2 dogs (10.5 years and 13 weeks!). Outside of work, I take time to recharge by dancing, reading, crocheting and socializing.I am so thrilled to be part of this amazing WIT community at LinkedIn - the posts, messages that I read regularly are tremendously uplifting and inspiring

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