The Mason Spirit

At Amazon: Cloud Security Engineer

For Devabhaktuni, the several months she spent working for Amazon in her hometown of Bangalore, India, were more than a job. They were a learning experience.

“The learning curve was very high,” she says. “We work with customers who come in with different types of issues, so we end up learning coding and networking. The scope of learning is not just limited to security.”

Rajitha Devabhaktuni is a cloud security engineer at Amazon.

Devabhaktuni came to Mason from India specifically for the university’s computer science program. She also figured that Northern Virginia, with its many companies and proximity to Washington, D.C., isn’t a bad place to look for a job.

Another bonus was the year she spent as a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology in the Volgenau School of Engineering.

She also assisted Mason computer science professor Kamaljeet Sanghera in the development of a class that will be part of a Mason cloud computing bachelor’s program in partnership with Amazon Web Services.

“Through my tenure as a teaching assistant, I was exposed to a great diversity of students who come from different educational backgrounds,” Devabhaktuni says of her time at Mason. “The experience I gained through my work at Mason helped me get better at leadership and teamwork. I learned time management and to work independently and do everything on my own.”

Devabhaktuni says she was not surprised Amazon chose Northern Virginia, considering the high-quality universities in the area, especially Mason—a place she says she so enjoyed, “I wish I could have taken more courses.”

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