Hi, I'm Jon! 👋 I'm an Engineering Manager for Customer Identity at Gusto, a former Staff Software Engineer, and an ex-Amazon engineer. I grew from a small company's engineering team into Amazon and then Gusto, and I enjoy helping other engineers build their skills and navigate their next career step.

My background spans backend engineering, distributed systems, platform architecture, reliability, and identity. At Gusto, I've led customer identity work across authentication, SSO, MFA, account recovery, and account security. Previously, I built identity and login infrastructure at Amazon.

I've mentored engineers at different career stages and conducted technical interviews at Amazon and Gusto. I bring hands-on engineering experience and the perspective of someone who has progressed through senior and staff engineering into management.

Here's how I can help:

🚀 Career growth and technical leadership
Build a practical plan for your next role, grow toward senior or staff engineering, lead projects across teams, communicate technical decisions, and explore the transition into engineering management.

📚 Interview preparation
Practice coding, system design, and behavioral interviews with direct, actionable feedback. For Amazon interviews, I can help you develop clear examples around the Leadership Principles and explain your contributions.

🛠️ Backend engineering and system design
Strengthen your fundamentals, review code and architecture, and reason through scalability, reliability, migrations, and operational tradeoffs. My experience includes Java, Ruby on Rails, APIs, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes.

🔐 Identity and authentication
Understand OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SSO, MFA, and account recovery, and learn how to design authentication systems that balance security, reliability, and user experience.

🌱 Sustainable growth
Being a strong engineer takes more than technical knowledge. We can work on communication, prioritization, and the habits that help you grow while maintaining perspective and balance.

My approach is collaborative and tailored to your goals. Whether you're building a stronger foundation, preparing for interviews, or taking on broader technical leadership, we'll identify the gaps that matter and turn them into concrete next steps.

Tell me where you are today and what you'd like to achieve, and let's build a plan together. 🤝