Chloe Smith

My path to becoming a Senior Cloud Architect has never followed a straight line and I’ve learned that’s exactly where the power is.

I didn’t grow up dreaming about tech. I grew up navigating an environment that required resilience, awareness, and grit long before I had language for those things. What I did have was a high GPA, and a high school counselor who saw something in me and refused to let me play small. She gave me two options: college or the military. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, didn’t feel pulled in any one direction, so I made a decision that would quietly shape everything that came after. I enlisted.

I didn’t even tell my parents beforehand. I just showed up with the paperwork and told them I was joining.

I scored high on the ASVAB, which placed me into Open Admin and eventually led me to a help desk position. At the time, it wasn’t a passion, it was a practical choice. I had joined during wartime and was intentionally looking for something that would keep me behind a desk and out of deployment zones. Tech, for me, started as protection. Stability. Distance from danger.

But something unexpected happened there.

That help desk role became my entry point into a world I didn’t know I would come to love. I was learning systems, solving problems, understanding how things connected and more importantly, how to fix them when they broke. Without realizing it, I was building a foundation.

Still, when my enlistment ended, I followed a completely different dream.

I went to culinary school, Le Cordon Bleu and graduated at the top of my class. That chapter of my life felt aligned with something deeper in me. Creativity. Expression. Precision. I was good at it. Good enough to get a callback to audition for Top Chef. And then life shifted again.

I found out I was pregnant, and not just pregnant, but high-risk. Everything slowed down. Everything got quiet. And in that stillness, I had to make another decision, not based on ambition, but on responsibility. On stability. On what I already knew I could rely on.

So I went back to tech.

What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t going backward, I was stepping into the version of myself that had been quietly building all along.

Over the next two decades, I grew with the industry. I stayed curious. I adapted. I kept showing up, even in rooms where I didn’t always see myself reflected back. Tech is a male-dominated space, and more often than not, I was the only woman on my team. That reality can either shrink you or sharpen you. For me, it became fuel.

Today, I am a Senior Cloud Architect at The Mosaic Company, where I’ve been for the past two years. I work at the intersection of cloud infrastructure and emerging technology, currently leading and contributing to AI initiatives as an AI ambassador, helping teams understand not just what’s possible, but what’s next. I also hold a Top Secret SCI clearance, adding another layer of responsibility and trust that has shaped my professional journey.

Looking back, none of this was linear. None of it was planned in the way people often expect success to be.

But every pivot mattered.

Every version of me, the one who enlisted without a roadmap, the one who plated dishes with precision, the one who chose stability in the face of uncertainty, she’s still here. She just evolved.

And that’s what I want other women, especially those who don’t see themselves in tech yet, to understand: there isn’t one way in. There isn’t one look, one background, one story that qualifies you.

This field is wide. Expansive. Still changing.

And there’s space in it.

Not in spite of the stories women carry, but because of them.