From Field Hockey to WhatsApp: A USC Master’s and a Career Building for Billions

Neeraj Narang never thought he would be a software engineer. "I played field hockey and wanted to grow up to be a sportsman, and then reality came, and I had to pick a field," he says. He started picking up computer science in 11th grade.

Today, Narang is a Staff Software Engineer at Meta and tech lead for WhatsApp Growth, leading a team of 10-plus engineers. One of his projects, on-device message translation, launched in September 2025 and was announced by Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.

From an Android Game to USC

After earning his bachelor's degree in India, Narang went to work. In 2010, he built a simple Android game in his free time. It reached 70,000 downloads, a solid number in the early days of smartphone apps. "I was very curious," he says. "It was exciting to work on a new technology."

He had never worked on Android professionally, but he decided to become a mobile developer. Peers around him had been talking about master's degrees in the United States, something he had never considered. He began looking at American universities, and USC stood out: a highly rated computer science program in California, part of a top-10 engineering school. He enrolled in 2012 and took courses focused on web and mobile technologies.

Learning to Build Together

What defined the program for Narang was the difficulty of the problems. In Professor Ellis Horowitz's* web technologies course, he and a couple of classmates built Android apps, breaking down the problem and deciding who would build what, his first time making a mobile app as part of a team. In another course, the class built a search engine to index documents and retrieve them with Solr. Between those and operating systems, he had to learn tools he had never used, under pressure. What he took from USC, he says, was "picking up something new within a couple of months in a semester, and then building a product out of it that is working, and working in a team."

Back home, projects were handed to individuals, in class and at work. "Learning tools, working with teams," he says. "That's something I did not experience in India."

For three semesters, he also built a Java application for a USC lab, letting users reserve time on its equipment while tracking who used it and for how long. He owned it completely and worked with the lab manager on features. "It helped me think long-term, think larger," he says. It's something, he adds, that you won't learn in a classroom alone.

Sport stayed part of his life. Outside class, he played on the Viterbi soccer team, which won the Viterbi Cup and earned a final game against the professors. "That was a very unique experience for me," he says. At graduation, he walked in a gown with friends and his family there. "In India, at least where I was, graduation wasn't a thing," he says. "It feels great, especially when you already have a job lined up."

Building for Billions

That job was at Samsung Research in Mountain View, an offer he received at the start of his fourth semester. He joined that June. After a little over a year of exploratory work, he wanted to iterate on an app with users and learn from their response, so he moved to the real estate app Trulia. After about three and a half years there, with Meta recruiters reaching out, he joined Meta in 2018, first on the team behind Portal, a smart video-calling device he calls the first of its kind. He led a team there before moving to WhatsApp.

"That's where I think I really grew," he says. WhatsApp is used by billions of people and is built around privacy, and his growth team focuses on expanding it in the United States, with user studies and product roadmaps alongside engineering. "Whatever I'm building, I'm using it myself daily."

Message translation began as a personal problem. His son's teacher spoke only Spanish, and every WhatsApp exchange meant bouncing back and forth to Google Translate - a security risk hidden in plain sight. But the friction was far from unique. WhatsApp is a lifeline for multilingual communities worldwide, and user research confirmed that breaking down language barriers was among the most requested features. The catch: WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption means messages can't be sent to an outside server to be translated. So he worked with Meta's in-house translation team to bring on-device machine learning into the app - tearing down language walls without opening a backdoor.

"I was my first dogfooder," he says. "I still use it." The launch drew coverage around the world. "It feels really great," he says, "because the reach of WhatsApp is huge."

Worth the Investment

Looking back, Narang sees his USC master's as a step up. Asked whether his bachelor's degree from India alone would have been enough to succeed in the U.S., he answers plainly: "Definitely not." At USC, he learned the engineering-driven way of working he says he still finds at Meta, a contrast with the top-down structure he remembers from India.

Was it worth it? Narang says yes, and he would recommend it to anyone eager to learn from its faculty. He has also become part of USC's alumni network at Meta, helping other graduates get referrals. "I can say I helped the network," he says. "For me particularly, it was pretty useful," he adds. "I got to learn the tech stack that I wanted to learn, got to work with a lot of smart people, and from really smart professors. There are some really well-known professors at USC in their fields." Looking ahead, he says he definitely wants to launch a startup of his own someday, though not anytime soon.

*Ellis Horowitz is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science within the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Stevens School of Computing and AI.

Published on October 21st, 2026

Last updated on October 21st, 2026