Shahrzad Mirkhani received her PhD in Computer Engineering from Texas ECE in 2014. After serving as a VP of Engineering in the startup Bigstream, she recently joined Meta as a software engineer. We sat down with Shahrzad to learn more about her career in engineering and her time at UT Austin.

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF.

I was born and raised in Iran. I got my B.Sc. in computer engineering from Sharif University of technology, and M.Sc. in computer engineering from University of Tehran. I, my husband, and my one year old son came to the United States in Spring 2008 so that I can start the computer engineering Ph.D. program at UT Austin. The next semester, my husband also joined the Ph.D. program in computer engineering and our family of three spent most of the time on the beautiful UT campus. My son walked for the first time in the ACES building! After I got my Ph.D. I started a one year post-doctoral program at Stanford University to prepare for applying to Universities for faculty positions. However, several factors made me change my mind and instead I started in my husband’s startup as a founding engineer to help him build his company. I was supposed to be in that position for about 6 months and then start applying to universities for faculty positions, but the startup challenges made me change my mind. After more than 5 years, I decided to change my mission as the VP of engineering at a startup to a software engineer in a big company and that is why I joined Meta in 2021. Apart from software development and automation, I enjoy swimming, biking, cooking, gardening, playing board games with my son, chilling with my cat, and watching movies with my family and friends. A day that I learn something new or help somebody else learn a new thing is a great day for me.

TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING NOW.

Currently I am a part of the metrics platform group at Meta. Our group takes care of the infrastructure development for other teams so that they can develop their user-facing metrics with high standards and minimal effort. I am the tech lead of the team responsible for external real-time metrics. As software engineers in the metrics platform area, we collaborate with multiple product teams and we get to know some details of all Meta’s products (Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp).

Dealing with billions of data points every day makes my job astonishing.

HOW DID YOU END UP AT UT? WHAT PATH LED YOU HERE?

From my childhood, I had this dream to become a teacher. I remember that one of my games was to arrange all my dolls and toys in an imaginary classroom and teach them!

When I started my masters degree with my advisor, the idea of becoming a teacher came back to my mind. This time, the passion for research was also added to it. During my masters degree, I became familiar and fascinated with Prof. Jacob Abraham’s research. UT being one of the top universities in computer engineering programs and Prof. Abraham being one of Texas ECE’s faculty members were the top reasons why I put UT as my first choice.

IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVE WORKED FOR A START-UP/SMALLER COMPANY AND NOW YOU WORK FOR META, ONE OF THE BIGGEST TECH COMPANIES IN THE WORLD. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES IN THOSE WORKING EVNVIRONMENTS AND HOW CAN YOUNG STUDENTS DISCOVER WHICH ENVIRONMENT IS RIGHT FOR THEM?

At Meta, or any big company, you are a small part of a big thing. Every day you can learn a lot of things, you have the chance to collaborate with different teams and work on different products, and you learn how to make an impact in such a big environment. Being in a startup, in contrast, is to be a big part of a small thing, which “might” become a big thing in the future. Every day you have to learn new stuff, you might wear a lot of hats, you have to be able to manage your time efficiently, and you have to learn the power of pivoting if things do not go the right way. Usually, in startups there is a limited budget to make a product and bring customers within a short period of time. This makes every employee of a startup to work focused throughout one goal: make the company become the next big thing. I believe everybody who is seeking an exciting career shouldn’t lose this opportunity to try both startups and big companies, because they can learn valuable and unique skill sets from each environment. Although the differences deeply depend on the companies themselves, here are a few points that I have learned throughout my career.

If you are self motivated, ready to learn new concepts at a fast pace, up for big technical and strategic challenges, passionate for building 0 to 1 products, and not afraid of taking risks, you can be a great fit for startups. If you are willing to work with more established products, want to meet and learn from several senior engineers, want to have a better work-life balance, learn how the processes look when a company scales up, and want to have a deterministic growth path you will have a great time in bigger companies.

No matter where you work, it is you who can learn from situations that happen every day at work.

YOU DID A POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP AT STANFORD AFTER RECEIVING YOUR PHD. DO YOU THINK POSTDOC POSITIONS ARE IMPORTANT AND HOW DID IT HELP BRIDGE YOUR CAREER BEFORE STARTING IN INDUSTRY?

The main reason that I started a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford was to start my career in academia. If you know that you want to start in industry, I would suggest starting your career in industry sooner rather than later, since the challenges that you face in academia might not be 100% matching the ones you face in the industry. In my case, that fellowship taught me more details about challenges in academia and I was able to choose my path more clearly.

WHAT IS ONE OF YOUR PROUDEST MOMENTS IN YOUR CAREER IN ECE?

I can think of a few! The first time that I met Prof. Alan Emerson, the winner of the 2007 Turing award, in his verification course, I was so proud to have the opportunity to meet, and even more important, learn from top scientists of our time. It was a unique experience.

Another moment that I felt proud and honored was the time that Prof. Jacob Abraham accepted to be my Ph.D. advisor. Before I moved to the United States it was big enough for me to meet him in a conference. If I was told that he would become my Ph.D. advisor one day, I wouldn’t believe it.

The day I defended my Ph.D. thesis was another proud moment. Studying in a competitive program and raising a kid without any family/help around made my and my husband’s Ph.D. time a bit challenging. I was thinking about quitting several times along the way. Even now, it makes me smile when I realize that I didn’t give up and accomplished what I always liked to accomplish.

WHAT IS AN IMPORTANT LESSON YOU HAVE LEARNED IN YOUR CAREER THAT YOU WISH YOU COULD GO BACK AND TELL YOUR YOUNGER SELF?

The first and most important thing I would say is “believe in yourself so that others believe in you!”. I never believed in myself as much as I should have and I’m still working on it. Also, I would definitely tell my younger self not to be scared of failure. As a matter of fact, I would tell my younger self to embrace failure.

Every time I failed in something, I learned priceless lessons which led to my next success. What I have learned throughout these years is that the way to grow is to be bold, occasionally fail, and learn from failures. If I do not fail for a long time it means that I have found my comfort zone and stayed there. Nobody has changed the world by staying in their comfort zone!

It is interesting how many times I heard all of the above phrases when I was young and I consider them as clichés.

WHO HAS BEEN A MAJOR INFLUENCE ON YOUR LIFE?

It is clear that all my mentors and advisors had a major impact on my life. I have learned how to write papers and not to give up from my Masters advisor, Prof. Zain Navabi.

My Ph.D. advisor, Prof. Jacob Abraham taught me to always dream big and not to settle for small achievements. However, I believe my most major influence in life is my family.

My mother raised me and my brother as a single mom. Although she couldn’t afford the tuition, she insisted that I should go to one of the best schools in Tehran. I will never forget the day she sold her favorite piece of jewelry to be able to pay my tuition.

My older brother always helped me with any problems that I had in life! He once told me that life is a long game and in order to be a happy and successful person, I need to enjoy finding the unwritten rules of this game. With his vast knowledge about many things, especially math and physics, I always had a patient tutor at home! He encouraged me to choose computer engineering when I was a senior at high school and had little to no knowledge about computers. At that time, I was so passionate about mathematics and wanted to choose math as my major. He explained to me what to expect in the computer engineering path and assured me that I would love it, and I did! I met my husband, Maysam Lavasani, who also was a computer engineering student, during my undergraduate program and after graduating we started our life together. Without him in my life, I would probably have started a job right after I got my bachelors degree, wouldn’t dare to pursue my dreams, and certainly wouldn’t migrate to the United States. We technically grew up together and I cannot even measure how much influence he has had on my life.

IF YOU COULD PROVIDE ONE POSITIVE MEMORY OF YOUR TIME AT UT THAT STANDS OUT, WHAT WOULD THAT BE?

There are so many of them! I found some of my closest friends, whom I can count on like family, during my time at UT. There is one cute memory that makes me smile every time I think of it. During my last semester, when I had to write my thesis and get ready for defense, my advisor asked me to become his T.A. in the “Introduction to Computing” course. This is an entry level course and most of the students who take it are fresh high school graduates. The workload for this T.A. position with more than 100 students was heavy and I wasn’t sure if I was able to get ready for my defense with that additional workload. I recall that I had a session each Friday to go over all the concepts of the week with students. At the beginning of the semester, several students were struggling with understanding basic concepts. I tried to keep the sessions more interactive and kept challenging them. Those sessions made us have a really good relationship and I could see how they were growing and how their way of thinking about computers was changing. One time, after we were done with our Friday session, one of the students came to me and said “can I ask a question from you? I’ve been struggling with this one.” and I said “sure, bring it on!”. Then he quietly said “well… it is actually a math question for my other course!”. From that moment I realized that I should be a passionate teacher, otherwise my students wouldn’t feel comfortable enough to reach out to me for their other courses. Although I haven’t pursued a teaching profession yet, I’m still seriously thinking about bringing back teaching to my life.

WOMEN HAVE LONG BEEN MARGINALIZED IN STEM AREAS. HOW DO YOU THINK WE CAN HELP/ENCOURAGE MORE WOMEN BECOME INVOLVED IN STEM FIELDS?

Fortunately, in the past decade I can see a change in the number of women in STEM fields (at least I can see it in the computer engineering field). That, by itself, should be an encouragement for young women who like to be involved in STEM. And I hope that the women who are already involved in STEM fields support their younger fellows in this path. I agree that women have been marginalized in STEM areas and there are multiple factors that play huge roles in this situation. I would like to mention some of those factors which helped me move forward in the engineering field.

Women need to reach this belief that being strong in STEM fields is orthogonal to their gender, unless I have missed some major scientific studies that concludes otherwise. They need to keep in mind not to link their weaknesses in STEM to their gender.

They need to seek the root cause somewhere else and improve it. Another point that can help them grow in STEM fields is to continuously seek measurable and constructive feedback from their managers, mentors, and more senior co-workers, especially if they feel that they are not growing as much as they deserve. Nothing is more useful for their growth than constructive feedback and it gives them a chance to see themselves from other people's lenses. They need to keep an open mind about the feedback (or even criticism) that they receive instead of getting upset, disappointed, offended, or taking it personally (even if it is!). This change of attitude has helped me a great deal in the past few years to improve my weak areas and become even stronger in my strong areas. Another point that can greatly help everyone to get involved in the fast paced STEM fields is to have both short- and long-term plans for their dream career. Those plans might or might not work, but they certainly give them a vision on how to reach their next milestone in their career.