Army veteran in SF guides fellow vets toward technology careers
SAN FRANCISCO – From the time she was a young girl growing up in Morocco, Ikram Mansori could picture herself in uniform.
As a teenager who immigrated to San Francisco, where she attended Mission High School, it would be one of the first things she tried to achieve.
"I tried to join the Marines when I was 17, but mom wouldn't sign off," Mansori laughed. "I had to go to UC Davis and during my second year I thought I was wasting my life. I was like 'I could go to school and be at war at the same time' so I joined the Army."
Mansori served in the 82nd Airborne Division, 18th Airborne Corps and 573rd Military Intelligence, training to become a paratrooper and specializing in signal intelligence.
"I always say that the Army raised me because I went in so young," she told KPIX 5.
After her time in the Army, she transitioned to a civilian job at the Department of Defense, and eventually moved back to San Francisco to be closer to her family. Mansori parlayed her military experience to a career in tech, landing a job at Twitter.
"It just made sense to transition to a similar role being a lead on a team at trust and safety within Twitter specifically content moderation and anything from counterterrorism or combatting children sexual exploitation," she said.
Mansori eventually connected with Katherine Webster, the CEO & Founder of VetsInTech, a San Francisco non-profit that aimed at landing veterans and their spouses sometimes lucrative careers in technology. It was a natural fit for Mansori, who saw a synergy between veterans with vast technical training and team-building skills and highly collaborative environments at startups and larger tech firms.
VetsInTech provides training courses to veterans in everything from coding to artificial intelligence, and Webster saw Mansori as someone whose skills and background made her perfect for the organization.
"She doesn't look like what people expect a veteran to look like. And so when you can see that face and know that you can do it too," Webster said.
To learn more about VetsInTech, visit https://vetsintech.co/.
