Mahshad was born and raised in Tehran/Iran. She moved to the United States after finishing high school.  She got her Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1997. Her career started as a hardware engineer with a small company building air traffic control switches, but she quickly realized that she was more passionate about software and Information Technology disciplines.

She got her Master’s degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and pivited her career into the world of software engineering and Web application development for the US government as a contractor.

Eventually, her love of technology and passion for advocating for better and more efficient ways of managing IT, lead her down the path of sales engineering, first with EMC and then Google. She has been working with Google Cloud since January of 2011 in various capacities. Today, she manages a team of cloud customer engineers whose mission is to evangelize Google Cloud capabilities and educating the industry on the benefits of using a public multi-tenanted cloud.