Getting to Know Mira Thambireddy
LinkedIn wouldn't be the company it is today without the engineers who built it. We have no shortage of talented individuals in technical roles across the company. They are the ones who create, build, and maintain our platform, tools, and features—as well as write posts for this blog. In this series, we feature some of the people and personalities that make LinkedIn great.
Mira Thambireddy is a Senior Security Engineer at LinkedIn working on the Security Assessment team as part of House Security. Her team focuses on product security and performs security and privacy reviews for various products, including engineering design reviews, threat modeling, and penetration testing. Prior to joining LinkedIn in Oct. 2016, Mira worked as a security consultant in Silicon Valley.
What do you love most about being a part of the Security Assessment team?
The best part about being a part of the Security Assessment team at LinkedIn is that you get to work with different teams to provide security guidance. It's exciting to be involved in the engineering process from the inception of an idea for a product to making it available to members.
What first made you interested in working in Security?
During my undergraduate studies in engineering, I was captivated by the different problems and techniques within cryptography. At around the same time, I started playing around with web applications. In particular, I became fascinated with finding loopholes in these applications and tinkering with them to get more out of them than just what was apparent on the surface. Once I realized that I had this natural curiosity for security and its related fields, I chose to pursue a formal education in it for my master’s degree.
How would you describe the engineering culture at LinkedIn?
Most of what I love about the engineering culture here involves the people I get to work with. As security engineers, we tend to work individually on different projects, yet there is a very strong sense of team unity, which stems from the time we spend together having both technical and non-technical discussions. At the same time, I get to experience a great sense of cross-functional collaboration. The supportive nature of everyone I work with clearly shows that it takes a team to innovate and develop at the highest level. Lastly, the caliber of folks around me is such that it is both inspiring and very easy to learn from them, which helps with my career trajectory and overall fulfillment.
What is something about you not found on your LinkedIn profile?
I love being in nature and I love hiking, backpacking, and mountaineering. I have trekked Mt. Kilimanjaro, Everest base camp, Annapurna circuit, Torres del Paine, and several U.S. 14ers, including Mt. Whitney, Mt. Shasta, and Mt. Rainier.
What are your favorite things to do when you’re not at the office?
I like working on arts and crafts projects. For example, as of late I am learning pyrography techniques. And occasionally, I work on jigsaw puzzles.