She is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
[2] After working in user interface design at Google from 2003 to 2007,[3] she returned to graduate school, completing a Ph.D. in informatics at the University of California, Irvine in 2013.
[2] Her dissertation, Designing Citizens in Transnational India, was supervised by Paul Dourish.
[2] In 2023, she became the inaugural Faculty Director of the UC San Diego Labor Center.
Irani is the author of the book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019),[4] which won the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for Science, Technology, Engineering, or Medicine of the American Anthropological Association[5] as well as the 2020 Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association.