Mamta Upadhyay

I started with passion and interest in this field, but what made me stay in it for so long is dedication, patience, and discipline. Those are the things that kept me going through over 15 years in cybersecurity. I just wanted to be in this field from the beginning, and that passion combined with maintaining discipline and patience has been key to my success. It's about staying committed to what you love and being disciplined enough to keep pushing forward even when things get challenging.

The best career advice I ever received was from my brother, who works in machine learning. He kept convincing me to take trainings on AI and machine learning, even though it wasn't relevant to my job at the time. I was in cybersecurity and he was in machine learning, but he always pushed me to learn about AI and take those courses. I would say he is the one who actually pivoted me in this direction. That advice to learn AI and machine learning even when it seemed outside my immediate work turned out to be the best thing for my career. It helped me switch from traditional security to agentic security, which is keeping me at the forefront of the field. My current job at a big tech company is all because of that advice. It taught me the importance of staying ahead of the curve and learning new technologies even when they don't seem directly applicable to your current role.

First of all, don't give up, because I have noticed, especially women, after they start a family, they tend to slow down and give up, only to realize a few years down the line that was a bad decision. There are always options - there are options to raise your kids, there are options to get help. You don't have to give up your career for that. I think that's what women lack. I myself had so many issues raising two kids with a husband who is always working in the ICU. It has never been easy, but I have taken all the help. I spent money, I get all the help, but I make sure that I don't give up on my career, because that's the dream I had since one day. I don't want to give up on it just because there are other responsibilities. In fact, if you go through it and come out of it, you become much stronger. Women can do so many things at once - that's our superpower. It's just about dedication. And another thing, not just for women but for every person coming out of college: just keep yourself up to date. It's normal for people, once they settle into a job, to lose out on what's happening in the real world. That's a bad way, because if you come out of that job and you're not caught up, at least you don't know what's happening in terms of tech, you'll feel that you're lagging behind. So always keep up, keep on reading, understand what's happening in the tech world, and if necessary, take the training, even if it's not relevant to your job.

The biggest challenge is to make people understand the importance of security. Engineers always consider security people as bottlenecks. They want to launch fast, they don't want to wait, and security is always in a catch-up mode. We want them to do it right, but because of competition - Amazon competing with Microsoft, Amazon competing with Google - they want to launch in 15 days. 15 days is never enough for security. Convincing these people that you have to do it right, it's okay to delay the launch, is always a problem with us. Security is a combination of engineering, cybersecurity, people management, and project management. You have to wear multiple hats. You can't just be technically good - you have to be able to convince people and deal with people. There are always escalations and getting in the room and arguing with people. Just this morning, half of my time went into convincing people that this is how you're gonna get affected, and they just don't want to understand. They're like, you are just blocking us, you are slowing us down. But at the end of the day, I feel like I had a day well spent, even though I had people issues to go through. I made sure that security won. It does not win 100% of the time, but even if it wins 80% of the time, there is something we contributed towards it. The challenge is that if there is a security breach, they will do audits and point fingers at security asking who approved it. We take blame both sides - we have to keep on convincing these people, but if something major happens, we are on the receiving end.

Maintaining a routine and maintaining discipline are the most important values to me. I also believe in knowing when to stop and being able to context switch from professional life to personal life. It's about having that balance and discipline to separate work from home, while maintaining consistency and routine in both areas of my life.