Jonathan Burns

Hello there 👋

I'm Jon - I've been a software engineer for 10 years, working my way up from a small local startup company into FAANG and the Silicon Valley startup world. I am passionate about mentoring and helping others navigate the tech world, having mentored dozens of full time engineers of various career levels throughout my time at Amazon and Gusto. I would love to share my experiences with you, both technical and non technical, to help you accelerate your career!

My approach to mentoring is focused on letting the mentee (you) drive the relationship and work together towards your goals. That said, my particular areas of expertise are:

📚 Interview preparation: I conducted 50+ interviews during my time at Amazon and Gusto and I have a deep understanding of the traits and skills that are necessary to clear the dreaded coding/system design interview loop. I can provide strong guidance here in the way of interview preparation, and even conduct mock interviews if you would like! If you are applying to Amazon specifically, I can also talk in-depth about the Leadership Principles (LPs) and give you a blueprint for passing the behavioral portions of these interview loops.

🚀 Career trajectory and growth strategy: You don't necessarily need to attend a top university or start your career at a top company to be successful - I managed to self-teach myself the necessary skills to land a job at a FAANG company which has allowed my career to flourish. I can share many of the things I had to learn the hard way during this journey to help you achieve your career goals and land your dream job!

🧪 Technical guidance: I have designed, built, and maintained a variety of web applications over the course of my career, implementing code across the entire stack and the AWS infrastructure required to support systems that scale for millions of active users. I have the most experience with Java, Ruby, and Python but I am happy to provide general coding advice for whatever language/framework you may be working with. In addition to help with the application development side, I can also provide guidance on system design, specifically on how to best leverage AWS resources to design for high availability and elasticity. I also have a specialization in authentication/authorization related systems, so if that is of interest to you I could provide a lot of context and demystify some of the complexity around popular auth protocols such as OAuth and SAML.

🧠 Mindset: Being a strong engineer is about more than just technical acumen, it requires good habits and a healthy mindset to be successful in the long term. I can share what has worked for me to achieve high quality results while hedging the stress of a fast paced work environment and maintaining balance and perspective outside of work.