From Intern to Employee: A Feature Interview with Urvashi Mohnani, Associate Software Engineer at Red Hat

Urvashi Mohnani, Software Engineer at Red Hat, is a regular contributor to the open source community and Red Hat technology. As someone who entered college with no computer science experience, Urvashi never envisioned herself as a programmer.

“I joined Red Hat about a year ago as an intern. I graduated with a Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering and found my passion in software by the end of my senior year,” she said. “ I didn’t have much industry experience in Software Engineering when I started at Red Hat, but my mentor and supervisor, Dan Walsh, was really helpful in getting me up to speed with the Red Hat Container Technologies like CRI-O and OpenShift.”

When it came to transitioning into a full-time position, Urvashi choose Red Hat because of the open culture and strong community.

“Open source has helped me feel confident and supported because I have a community to collaborate with. I’m never stuck wondering with questions like: Can I tell them about this? Can I do that? It’s all out in the open.”

During her time at Red Hat, Urvashi has been involved in contributing to the ChRIS project. This was an opportunity made possible by the Red Hat Boston University Collaboratory.

“The ChRIS project is an initiative to cut down the time radiologists spend staring at images everyday, so that patients can receive instantaneous results.” she said. “Open source is great because you can share and get help from the community. It’s nice not to be restricted to only a few developers on a team.”

When she isn’t contributing directly to the Collaboratory projects, Urvashi works with the OpenShift Runtimes team to improve products like Podman, Buildah, CRI-O, and Skopeo.

“These are basically products for image building, running containers, and container debugging,” she explained. “The goal is to make our products the default.”

In the future, Urvashi hopes to get her MBA and continue developing her career at Red Hat, her main motivation being to give back to underprivileged children in her home country of Ghana.

If you want to learn more about internship and career opportunities at Red Hat, visit their job portal starting in August.