Developing Data Management and AI Expertise for New Career Direction
After working as a data engineer, Sri Poojitha Mandali, MS’24, information systems, transformed her technology skill set with a focus on data management and the ethical and creative use of AI to move into a new phase of her career.
Before joining Northeastern University, Sri Poojitha Mandali, MS’24, information systems, earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in India and worked as a data engineer at State Street Corp.
She thrived as a member of a global data team that developed data pipelines for critical financial operations, but she also wanted to deepen her technical skill set and explore emerging technologies like AI and machine learning. She decided to pursue an advanced degree to better position herself for professional roles focused on innovation and leadership. She selected Northeastern because of its robust academic offerings and its unique emphasis on experiential learning through co-ops and real-world projects. The university’s strong industry connections further reinforced her decision.
“Northeastern’s MS in information systems program strikes a great balance between software engineering, data science, and system design,” Mandali says.
The curriculum aligned with her goal of becoming a well-rounded data and AI professional. Through a blend of hands-on assignments, project-based learning, and industry-relevant coursework, she has been able to strengthen her technical foundation while developing a problem-solving mindset essential for addressing real-world challenges.
She was a teaching assistant in the Data Science Engineering Methods course, taught by Hong Pan, adjunct faculty. The class focused on foundational strengths, critical thinking, and real-world applicability, which Mandali says now shapes the way she approaches projects. The Advances in Data Science and Architecture course, taught by Nicholas Brown, associate teaching professor, underscored an interdisciplinary approach to AI, education, and social impact.
Mandali secured a co-op at Aura Sub LLC, a provider of digital security products, through the Northeastern NUWorks career portal. She found the graduate co-op advisor team particularly helpful with resume reviews and mock interviews.
At her co-op, she applied classroom learning to real-world challenges in a fast-paced, high-impact environment. Mandali was responsible for building scalable data ingestion pipelines using Databricks, orchestrating workflows with Airflow, and managing infrastructure via AWS. This experience enhanced her technical skills as she contributed to a production-grade data platform.
During her co-op she was also involved in building and optimizing data pipelines to support marketing analytics. One of her key projects included developing a Databricks-based ingestion pipeline that pulled large volumes of structured and unstructured data into AWS RDS and S3, ensuring the data was clean, dependable, and analysis-ready. Mandali also orchestrated workflows using Apache Airflow, improving the overall efficiency of data operations, and contributed system performance enhancements by implementing data validation checks and logging mechanisms.
Mandali says class projects added to her skill set. She particularly enjoyed working on MarketMind, a team project aimed at revolutionizing e-commerce through real-time analytics, personalized recommendations, and sentiment analysis. It is a cloud-based platform powered by Streamlit, FastAPI, Snowflake, OpenAI, and Gemini, with orchestration via Apache Airflow. Her focus was on building the data processing and embedding pipeline, ensuring that product reviews and metadata were cleaned, embedded using vector databases, and stored efficiently.
She also expanded her technical skills through the NVIDIA AI Hackathon, where she and her team secured second place. The challenge was to build a highly accurate, custom-generative AI model using NVIDIA NeMo. The experience underscored the importance of teamwork, perseverance, and rapid problem-solving skills that she will apply to future projects and professional challenges.
Mandali also volunteers as a machine learning engineer intern at the Humanitarians AI Fellows Program, which is run by Associate Teaching Professor Nicholas Brown.
Looking ahead, Mandali aspires to work at the intersection of data engineering, AI, and product innovation, where she can design scalable systems and intelligent applications that solve real-world problems.