Women in Digital: Dr. Rania Khalaf

Did you enjoy school?

I did. I grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, during the civil war. While the outside world was chaotic, math and science offered a sense of order and logic that I found comforting. My parents – an engineer and an interior designer – built cruise ships on the Nile, and my fascination with how complex systems come together began in the time spent exploring ships under construction in those Cairo shipyards. That curiosity led me to MIT at 17. School wasn’t just about grades; it was a safe harbor where I could explore how the world was built.

What qualifications do you have?

I earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s in EECS from MIT and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Stuttgart. However, in this field, degrees are just the start. My real qualifications come from two decades of “learning by doing” – evolving from a software engineer to technical leadership as a distinguished scientist, and eventually to the C-suite.

Has your career path been a smooth transition, a rocky road or a combination of both?

I view my career through the lens of agility rather than linearity. It has been an evolution from depth to breadth. I started at IBM “inventing the future,” dealing with technical unknowns. As I transitioned to the C-suite (first at a biotech startup and now at WSO2) my scope has expanded from solving algorithmic problems to solving organisational ones. The constant thread has been using technical expertise as a foundation to lead global teams, technology shifts, and drive international strategy.

What specific challenges do you see women facing in the industry?

Ideally, we all get to work and gender doesn’t matter but it’s not so simple. We can look at this from three lenses.

Start with biology – uncomfortable but unavoidable. With both my babies, I had to pump breast milk several times a day at fixed intervals as many mothers do. It was logistically messy, even though I was in a supportive environment and had my own office. Providing physical and temporal lactation spaces and free period products in bathrooms allows women to work with dignity and avert major disruptions.

A recent graduate in Canada shared that a mentor told her to never wear a dress to work or it will diminish her credibility. Now I make a special effort to wear a dress when I go on stage. Research shows competence and likeability are often negatively correlated for women. The need to navigate this trade-off, known as the ‘double bind,’ is distracting, especially early in one’s career.

Moving to culture, there is a myth of success around the ‘lone genius.’  I’ve been around people who believe their success depends on tearing down others, even on their own teams. It’s a fallacy. Innovation is a team sport.

What is the best career advice you can give to others?

Execute effectively, collaborate openly, and lead with empathy. Remember that your life is happening now, so live it. And take care of yourself; when people count on you, it is easy to put yourself last, but you must prioritise your health and relationships or you will not have the strength to help your team.

If you had to pick one mentor that had the biggest influence on you, who would it be?

There is no single influence, but a series of lessons and clarity from people along each stage of my life and career. My MIT advisors, Patrick Winston and Trevor Darrell, laid down my AI foundations before AI was cool. My first managers, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana and Paco Cubera, taught me to build first and to lead with empathy. My PhD advisor Prof. Dr. Frank Leymann taught me not to lose the easy points. Danny Sabbah and Giovanni Pacifici forged my executive path, taught me to push back on nonsense even if it came from the top and that ‘vision without execution is hallucination, while execution without vision is random walk.’ Ruchir Puri solved the hardest problems with a smile. Dario Gil worked with us to lead the transformation of a global organisation from its heart and soul. There are many more I have missed. The road is not linear, and the answer is rarely simple.

From where do you draw inspiration?

I’m inspired by knowledge and the interconnections between ideas. I often shift my physical perspective, standing, sitting on the floor, or moving around, because seeing a problem from a new angle can reveal patterns you’d otherwise miss. It’s the same principle as scrambling the letters of a word to discover new meaning.

That mindset aligns strongly with WSO2’s culture. We value openness, collaboration, and questioning the status quo. Inspiration comes not just from what we know individually, but what we uncover together when we exchange ideas freely and explore problems from multiple directions.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced to date?

Mastering the psychology of resilience, because there is not necessarily one challenge but a series of different sized bumps on the road. There is a line of Arabic poetry: “The winds blow counter to what the ships desire.” This is especially true in early-stage companies and at times of major change: the winds – market shifts or crises – will blow against you. Resilience comes from realising we cannot control the wind, but we do control the ship. To lead effectively and thrive, it helps to keep a disciplined focus on the “North Star” both the company’s strategic mission and our own life goals. We can then adjust the sails rather than succumb to the wind.

What qualities do you feel make a good leader?

The best leaders in deep tech must be ‘bilingual’ fluent in both engineering rigor and human empathy.

1. Intellectual Honesty: You need the technical grounding to know if the ship can actually reach the destination.
2. Psychological Safety: This isn’t a comfort zone; it’s an innovation engine. If a team is afraid to fail, they won’t take risks.
3. Empathy: I demand high performance, while being cognizant that the people building these systems have lives to live and families to love outside the office.

From a work viewpoint, what have the last 12 months been like?

Exhilarating. We have moved from hype to the reality of building and governing AI agents at scale. I joined WSO2 as chief AI officer and launched our AI platform capabilities to help enterprises operate generative AI securely at scale, interconnected with the enterprise digital fabric. Building agents in our integration products, securing agents and their tools with agent identity in our identity and access management suite, and governing LLM interactions with the AI Gateway in our API platform.

I’m excited about how AI is fundamentally changing software development, the interleaving of work among humans and AI and the medley of natural language and code. In our work on Natural Programming, we blend the determinism of code with the nuance of natural language to make programming more expressive. We are now extending our platform work with unified agent management and AI governance. Why? As AI becomes more prevalent, it is imperative to build the scalability and governance foundations to make it easier, safer, and more trustworthy.

What would you say are the biggest tech-based challenges we face today?

AI is everywhere, creating opportunities and challenges in every layer of the stack: from the hardware at its core to the humans working with it. Generative AI models are “predictably unpredictable.” The task now is knowing how to use it well given its current limitations and its future promise to manage the spectrum between human-assisted and fully autonomous systems, balancing risk appetite with performance.

The maturation of the agentic platforms that makes this easier and safer is what I am most focused on at the moment.

What can be done to encourage more women into the industry?

Stop framing technology as a solitary pursuit. When I was at MIT, Computer Science was 40 percent women, partly because the environment supported curiosity and collaboration. We need to highlight that tech is about solving human problems, which requires diverse perspectives. And we need to listen hard and work continuously to create and maintain an environment that is equitable for everyone on the team. 

Give us a fact about you that most other people wouldn’t know.

During my undergrad at MIT, I spent a summer in Pune, India, teaching computer science to middle schoolers and living with a wonderful host family who were kind enough to open up their home. It was one of the most grounding experiences of my life. That experience still drives my passion for making technology accessible and mentoring the next generation of leaders.