Services
$270 / month
Start free, decide later
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1
Free 7-day trial
No charge until day 7. Cancel anytime. -
2
Ongoing calls + chat
2 calls per month, unlimited Q&A. Replies in 24 hours or less. -
3
No lock-in
Month to month, no contract.
MentorCruise summary
Sung Won is a Principal Solutions Architect focused on open source. He has more than 10 years of data engineering experience and has worked across accounting, analytics, and data engineering. He helps data engineers choose career directions, build learning plans, and move toward more advanced roles.
Based on 19 verified mentee reviews
- Reviewers often praise his ability to turn career uncertainty into a clear direction, learning plan, and practical next steps.
- Mentees value his guidance for moving from analytics work into data engineering, including advice on tools, projects, and job searches.
- Two reviewers highlight his empathy and steady support during career changes.
About
I completed a full spectrum accounting education from my bachelor's, master's, CPA to working at a big accounting firm. This was all in a half-hearted attempt to rebel against my parent's wanting me to be a doctor/lawyer. In the end, I lost years of doing the work I actually love: using factual data to make important decisions for all things and making that accessible through open source, not just accounting. I wish I had mentors that empowered me to run towards problems that excite me rather than run away from one career to another. I hope to be that mentor I wish I had. Whether it's career or specific tech advice related to my skills, I've lived and breathed the problems you're facing now.
I'm excited to see you step closer to becoming someone you're proud of.
What mentees say
5 out of 5 stars
Sung has been my mentor in different seasons since 2021 when I initially wanted to make the transition from strict analytics work with light coding experience to full-on Data Engineering. The best thing I can say about him as a mentor is really the empathy he has combined with the drive and stickiness to keep being on the front-end of where the field is going. He is always exceptionally transparent and candid about what it takes and will always meet you where you are at. I had non-traditional career movement to where I'm at now as a mid-level Snowflake/dbt engineer for CamoAg, and he patiently shepherded me through both functional tooling and engineering-based problems and use cases that I wasn't getting in my then work experiences. I recently picked him up again for a few months to get a better understanding in how to practically transition from being a traditional developer to one that leverages large scale AI-enabled workflows effectively and it ended up being exceptionally meaningful because he had already been taking on similar implementations over on the West Coast.
Nathan
Standard Plan • 3 years
5 out of 5 stars
Sung was a fantastic mentor! I started working with Sung about 3 months ago. At that time, I was a data analyst at a large company and my job duties were a lot of data pipelines, dashboards, SQL, python, etc. I wanted to work on more interesting work beyond just data analyst work building dashboards. Sung and I worked on a plan for what I wanted my role to look like, what kind of company and industry I ideally wanted to join, and what I wanted my career to get to. Along the way we'd have calls where he would test my understanding of things, whether that be dbt, SQL, or python and would tell me how a hiring manager would understand my answer. We'd also go over what red flags to look for in job postings to make sure I wasn't joining a team/company that would not grow my skills. All in all, 3 months later, I'm happy to say I landed a role that I wanted at the company I wanted, having a 60k salary increase from my previous role!
Kamil
Standard Plan • 3 months
5 out of 5 stars
I'm a data operation/analyst at a small HR/payroll company with no senior engineer to learn from, and I'd felt stuck for a 2-3 years. I picked Sung because he switched careers himself. We shared similar but not identical career pathways. He got it right away. In our first call he sized me up honestly as an "Advanced Beginner", then built the plan around my actual job (implement dbt + Airflow properly in prod and use that as the interview story) instead of a generic course list. He also told me to stop grinding LeetCode and focus on SQL, Airflow and data modeling, which saved me a lot of wasted hours. Reviewed my resume the next day, blunt about which tools and job postings are worth your time, and genuinely responsive async. If you're an analyst trying to move into real data engineering, he's a great pick for sure.
Junjie
Standard Plan • 1 month
Get to know Sung Won
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Article 5 min readData Engineers are going to be whatever they want to be
More Importantly: What shapes what we want?
Read more
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VideoHow to Speedrun Persuading Your Leaders
This is unconventional advice on how I speedrun persuading leaders. You don't have to go through the tarpits of promotion …
Read more
What happens when you start
You tell Sung Won your goals. They see exactly what you want to work on before session one.
You meet within days. Sung Won reviews your application and books your first session, usually within a day or two.
You leave with a plan. Concrete next steps and a weekly rhythm from your very first week.
