Inspiring stories: Irina Kostina

As a society we tend to focus on titles and roles, we tend to forget that behind each title there is a person, a person who has a story to tell and every person’s story is unique.
In honor of International Women's day, we are interviewing inspiring women from our community who are going to share the story of how they got into Tech and how they got to where they are today.

In this post, I am interviewing one of my colleague, Irina Kostina , who is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

LinkedIn: Irina Kostina
Twitter: @ira_ad

Meet Irina Kostina

I’m Irina and I’m Cloud Solution Architect working with ISV(Independent Software Vendor) partners. People who don’t have IT background will probably wonder what is that cloud is about, so what I do is advising companies on how to modernize their software with Microsoft Azure platform which is Cloud. So I like to say that I can take you to the cloud ⛅️
I like participating in different events and conferences, Hackatons and etc as it gives the ability to meet great people and share my experience with others, that’s actually how I’ve met my boyfriend - through Women in tech community. My passion in professional way is innovation, startups and technology. For fun I do sports (played rugby 7 for 10 years) and I’m quite nerdy about nutrition and food, so I like cooking😊

When did you first become interested in technology and what sparked this interest?
I believe after I watched matrix or some other movie where they hacked, as a kid I thought it was so cool 😁

What education do you have?
I’m specialist (between bachelor and masters), I’ve finished Russian National Nuclear University, I was studying automation and electronics. Learned programming and software design by myself out of interest and because I really like creating things.

Describe your way towards your first job in tech; how did you land this job?
I was working in technical support for Antivirus ESETNod32. To be honest I didn’t get the job from the first attempt, neither did I in Microsoft from first attempt. But here I am, so persistence pays off!

Who were/are your biggest supporters in your career?
I didn’t have really any, so I was on my own many times where I wish I had a mentor. That’s why I would be happy to help someone who needs advice in their early stage of carrier.

Tell us more about your current job – e.g. what do you like most about your role?
I really enjoy seeing great things our partners build with Microsoft solutions and even though I am not creating anything even being small part of their journey makes me happy. Also in Microsoft things change rapidly, you always learn and develop, I’m amazed how much company is investing in people.

How does your typical day look like?
It’s quite interesting but all my days are different. I often travel, when I don’t travel I meet partners or prepare demos for them or researching how to make their solutions even better or studying something new.

What do you do in your free time?
I do lots of sports, dancing, cooking and.. hacking 

What advice will you give to women and girls who dream about a career in tech?
JUST DO IT! It’s ain’t no different from other careers, I see being a woman more an opportunity than obstacle. Some companies have opened positions for women only (to fight diversity) or you can get free tickets for conferences as an example, women and very welcomed in IT world.