From a Punjab village to Microsoft IT: how Kanu Priya built a career with a growth mindset

# Background and early influences

She earned admission to the computer science and engineering program at NIT Jalandhar and began a career that exposed her to diverse domains—e-commerce, fintech, and retail—while working at Publicis Sapient and later on large-scale systems at Expedia Group.

# Learning the Microsoft way Priya joined Microsoft Digital in 2021. The technical change required learning.NET and C# after previously working in Java and Python. More significant was the operating-model change: engineers at Microsoft are expected to own the whole application and its outcomes.

"You're not a back-end developer, you're not a front-end developer, you're not a dev ops engineer—you are everything," Priya says. That full-stack ownership includes understanding the customer problem, shipping a solution, monitoring production health, and improving the experience after release.

A growth mindset for her meant being comfortable with discomfort. Priya describes major career steps as choices to leave familiar ground and learn new skills. Amit Raghuwanshi, a principal software engineering manager who has worked with her for more than four years, highlights her willingness to take on new challenges across changing tech stacks.

# Career path and roles

• Early career: Publicis Sapient — exposure to multiple industries.
• Expedia Group: software development on global-scale systems.

# experiences Priya's recent work focuses on agentic AI and employee-facing self-service. She contributed to the Employee Device Information agent, a self-service tool that helps employees manage primary devices and correct inaccurate device records.

Her team uses Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio to build these agentic solutions, applying the same ownership model: design for customer problems, ship, monitor, and iterate.

# What this story shows for IT careers Priya's path highlights concrete career practices for people building IT careers:

• Be willing to switch languages and frameworks when the role demands it. Technical adaptability expanded her opportunities.
• Own the full lifecycle of the systems you build. That responsibility changes how you design and support software.

• Apply a growth mindset: choose discomfort that advances learning and scope.

# Next steps for readers If you work in IT and want to follow a similar path, look for roles that require end-to-end ownership, volunteer for cross-discipline work, and take on projects that move beyond implementation into production support and iterative improvement.