Blog  Engineering  

Women in Tech: Harshini Ramnath Krishnan, Technical Solutions Engineering Manager

by Amobee, May 25, 2018

Do you have a clear vision of the goals you hope to achieve during your career? Have you mapped the journey required to achieve these goals? Who are the people that will mentor you on your path to professional success? If you don’t have answers to these questions just yet, don’t worry, you are not alone.

I won’t pretend to be a career coach or industry expert, but my experience as a female engineer in the technology sector for nearly a decade has taught me invaluable career lessons.  I’ve learned how to inspire a team to create products that exceed expectations, the factors that matter when searching for a winning workplace culture, ways to overcome debilitating career challenges, and so much more. Today, I share my journey with you in the hope that it will provide you with some meaningful insight into your career.

My Background 

I moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast after graduating with a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from George Mason University in Virginia. After working for a couple of years with a reputed technology company in Virginia, I felt compelled to follow my dreams to the West Coast to experience the startup culture in Silicon Valley. It didn’t disappoint. The changing face of technology and vibrant culture made me feel at home right away. Shortly after my move, I joined Amobee as a Technical Solutions Engineer.

As one of the first engineers on the team, it was clear from the start that the role was a perfect fit. My position offered the perfect opportunity to pursue my passion of solving technical challenges while learning some of the most advanced technologies to build Amobee’s world-class digital advertising platform.

When I started out at Amobee over five years ago, the advertising technology space was one of the most challenging and rapidly growing sectors to work in. Five years later, I’m happy to say that the industry’s prospects and growth have only improved. Coming from a software engineering background, I was completely new to the digital advertising space. Everything I’ve learned about marketing technology and how it’s integrated and stacked, I learned from the ground up. As I’ve progressed with my career at Amobee, I’ve developed in-depth knowledge about our business model, our teams, and their functionality. By far, my favorite part about working at Amobee is taking an active role in designing and implementing solutions that truly make a difference.

Working at Amobee

Joining Amobee was the natural choice, since everything from the incredible people I interacted with during the interview process to the organization’s guiding values (passion, innovation and collaboration), fostered an exciting and inclusive environment. In fact, it was Amobee that helped me to realize just how important a positive and engaging work environment is to the quality of an employee’s performance. It’s a reality that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my career.

Since starting my career, I’m proud to have been a part of shaping Amobee’s advancements in engineering features, achievements, and the delivery of several key initiatives. Our team has come a long way in creating solid documentation of our platform and its features, and ensuring that our onboarding process provides all engineers with mentorship and the tools required to learn and be successful in their role.

My current role in technical solutions is a hybrid between technical skills (read, solve, and code challenges) and the interface of client relationships. Due to the nature of my position, I’ve developed product expertise and leadership skills by being challenged to translate technical problems into simple, understandable terms for our clients and partners. At Amobee, engineers have a customer-centric mindset and focus on building out features that add the most value to the customer.

Workplace Culture

As part of our organizational culture, the communication pipeline is open and honest between leadership and the teams. To facilitate transparent communication, Amobee has a “Coffee with CTO” program where engineers have the opportunity to have informal coffee discussions with the Chief Technology Officer every Wednesday. I credit this program as one of the main ways Amobee has consistently maintained a best-in-class engineering team, since every idea, question or suggestion has the opportunity to be heard.

Hiring at Amobee is a fair and unbiased process. When we screen candidates, a process I’m proud to take an active role in, those with potential are hired, leaving no talent on the sidelines regardless of the major challenges due to bias in the technology industry. Promotions within the organization are based on merit and an employee’s ability to execute, so every employee is passionate and gives their all in everything they do.

Currently, I am a key contributor in hiring exceptional technical talent and building out our international team. With Amobee’s advanced technology platform combined with the power of telco data from Singtel Group’s expansive global footprint, we are continuously building out our global operational support team to provide technical support to our customers worldwide. Engineers are continuously learning and updating as an integral part of their career, and I enjoy that Amobee provides the space for that development with no barriers to advancement.

During my time at Amobee I’ve had tremendous opportunities to contribute, learn and grow to help me develop leadership skills and be recognized as a respected engineer. Throughout the organization, leadership is highly supportive and personable and we have continuous cross-functional interactions with partner teams to foster conversations.  Employee’s opinions are not only valued, but encouraged. Amobee is interested in developing leaders who will change the face of the industry. To foster this development, Amobee offers product training, management courses, and development sessions hosted by industry experts.

Women in Technology

Throughout my career as an engineer, Amobee has shown commitment to supporting the advancement of women in technology and engineering. This serves as a constant inspiration to me. It has helped me to see the value in not only doing things right, but also doing the right thing. Treating all people, regardless of immutable characteristics, with respect and kindness has been the cornerstone of Amobee’s success in the industry.

Amobee and our parent company Singtel have built a coalition of female leadership. The CEO of Amobee, Kim Perell, is female. Amobee’s Chief Client Officer, Katie Ford, is female. The CEO of Singtel, Chua Sock Koong, is female. Plus, nearly 40% percent of Amobee’s managers are female, and 44% of our global workforce is female. It is both inspiring and humbling working for a company with such incredible female leadership.

To symbolize our commitment to supporting women at all levels, I was also honored to lead the participation of Amobee’s sponsorship of VerveCon 2018. A newly formed conference in the heart of Silicon Valley, VerveCon is devoted to highlighting the achievements of women in engineering and technology. Sending a team of all-female Amobee engineers to this empowering conference made me incredibly proud to be a part of something so special.

Final Thoughts

It’s been a life-changing experience to be an engineer at Amobee since launching my career in Silicon Valley. The people I have met are the brightest in the industry and the opportunity for learning and impact is vast. The future is bright for the organization and I’m excited as we continue to break barriers and impact the marketing technology industry.

As I progress further into my career, empowering women in technology and engineering will continue to be a priority for me. I believe in the power of lifting other women up, and it’s something that I believe can truly make a difference not only in Silicon Valley, but in the world.

 

 

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

If you’re curious to learn more, watch the on-demand demo or take a deep dive into our Research & Insights section where you can find recent webinars on-demand, media plan insights & activation templates, and more data-driven content. If you’re ready to take the next step into a sustainable, consumer-first advertising future, contact us today.

Read Next

All Blog Posts
Engineering

Amobee Sponsors VerveCon 2018 Tech Conference, Supporting the Advancement of Women in Technology & Engineering

To support empowering women in technology and engineering, Amobee is proud to sponsor the inaugural VerveCon 2018 Tech Conference in Santa Clara on February 9th. VerveCon is a convention for women in…

February 2, 2018

Perspectives

Global Scale, Human Solutions

The technology and solutions Turn provides are key to helping the brands and agencies solve complex marketing challenges. Watch this new video that showcases the passion and expertise of the team helping create “Global Scale, Human Solutions” for the world’s top advertisers.

January 11, 2016

Engineering

Optimizing for Multiple Performance Metrics

Recently, Turn research scientists Sergey Faleev and Jianqiang Shen and others from the applied science team wrote a paper accepted by the KDD conference, one of the most prestigious conferences in the data science field. See a video for an explanation of the technology.

June 28, 2016