You’ve probably used an Adobe product alongside billions of other users. Dibyo Mukherjee ’14, a lead software engineer at Adobe, is one of the faces behind the giant technology company.
After graduating from Allegheny College with a dual degree in applied computing and environmental studies, Mukherjee interned and later became a full-time employee at the software company Apigee.
Apigee was later acquired by Google in 2016. As a senior software engineer at Google, Mukherjee focused on designing and maintaining new features for the Company’s cloud division. Today, he improves the cloud software behind Adobe’s 100+ products. The code he’s developed remains open-source and publicly available.
Mukherjee credits the building blocks he learned at Allegheny, including theory and technical programming, as skills he still uses.
“Software changes very quickly, so you do have to learn on the job, but having that solid technical foundation definitely helps,” says Mukherjee.
He also credits an Allegheny professor for introducing him to a computer security program, leading him to intern with IBM for a summer.
“Software is a really exciting field, and it’s a diverse field. It’s one of those fields where it’s easy to get started, and there’s no shortage of problems to solve,” says Mukherjee. “[Students should] definitely see if they can get an internship. It’s very useful in terms of figuring out whether you enjoy working in the industry or not. Students can always get involved in open-source projects, even without an internship. That’s another avenue to build out a portfolio.”
