Careers: Susana Contrera: A Network Engineer who Keeps Meta's AI Infrastructure Humming

ing video games with her older brother.But she decided to pursue a career in engineering because of her parents, who were small-business owners."They were always telling me how technology was going to be a game changer in the future, and how a career in engineering could open many doors," she says.She enrolled at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas in 2001 to study telecommunications engineering.In her final year, she signed up for the training and certification program to become a Cisco Certified Network Associate.The program covered topics such as the fundamentals of networking and security, IP services, and automation and programmability.The certificate opened the door to her first job, in 2006, managing the computer network of a business-process outsourcing company, Atento, in Caracas."It was a very large enterprise network that had just the right amount of complexity for a very small team," she says."That gave me a lot of freedom to put my knowledge into practice."At the time, Venezuela was going through a period of political unrest.Contrera says she didn't see a future for herself in the country, so she decided to leave for Europe.She enrolled in a master's degree program in project management in 2009 at Spain's Pontifical University of Salamanca, continuing to collect additional certifications through Cisco in her free time.