In a brand-new interview series, we chat to senior employees in some of Ireland’s leading multinationals about their career journeys within Ireland’s dynamic sci-tech industries. First up is Microsoft’s security product lead Ilana Smith
Welcome to the first episode of our new Career Close-up series. In partnership with IDA Ireland, we sit down with senior figures from some of Ireland’s most innovative international companies, to get a sense of their exciting career trajectories.
In our first instalment SiliconRepublic.com editor Jenny Darmody chats with Microsoft Ireland’s Ilana Smith, who arrived in Dublin via Australia and Seattle to take up her current role as security product lead at the company’s Dublin office.
Smith had been drawn to the sciences at high school in Australia, particularly the ability to have a career that was truly practical. “I ended up studying electrical engineering and computer science, and through that, ended up in the software industry, because I wanted to build really big, impactful products.”
She soon discovered that the US was where the big opportunities lay in her field, and upped sticks to Washington DC where she was able to “build software products used by everybody around the world”.
“These days, though, I can do that from Ireland. So for me, personally, Ireland is a combination of a couple of really important factors,” she says. “I get to live in a society that aligns to my values. My family and I get to travel and to explore Ireland and Europe. I get to work every day and learn from fantastically talented people, and I still get to build big, important software impacting people all around the world, from right here in Ireland.”
Today, Smith is a leader in the Microsoft security division, which is responsible not only for keeping Microsoft and its customers safe, but also building products that help its customers keep themselves secure.
“Cyberattacks are growing in speed and scale and sophistication, so it really is an incredible responsibility,” says Smith “These days, our job is a little bit interesting, because as a company, we are currently undertaking an initiative we call the Secure Future Initiative. That is massive effort across the entire company, 35,000 engineers, where we’re really focused on raising the security of all our products.”
It puts Smith right at the heart of the initiative, and she clearly loves it. “I’m incredibly biased, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to work in any other industry but tech,” she says. “But I also think that tech skills are valuable in every single industry. Our CEO likes to say that every company is a tech company, and I think that’s true.
“I think the acquisition of tech skills enables you to be effective in just about every arena. For those who are looking at the tech industry, it is easy to imagine that only the super nerds can succeed, and I don’t think that’s true. To build solutions that serve the world, they need to be built by people who have viewpoints across all sorts of skillsets. No one set of skills creates a perfect solution. So we need strengths across the full spectrum.”
She wishes that everybody deeply considered the chance to work in tech. “I think our opportunity to have massive impact is so incredibly cool and exciting, and a wonderful opportunity, and it’s clearly a growth market for the future. That sets someone up for a fantastic career,” she says.
“It sounds cliched, but I’ve had the incredible privilege to be excited to come to work just about every single day for the last 20 years.”
Updated 12.02pm, 17 January 2025: This article was amended to clarify that Ilana Smith is a leader in the Microsoft security division rather than leader of the whole division and to clarify that was in Seattle, not Washington DC.
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