Software Site Reliability Engineer, Google, Portland, Or.
If you Google the best companies at which to work, you’ll find Google. Google “Jonathon Blumenthal” and you’ll also find Google, where he has worked for the past three and a half years.
Blumenthal is with Google’s Emerging Markets team, bringing products and services to countries with far less developed infrastructure than the United States.
He finds the company, the opportunities, and his location (Portland, Oregon) to his liking. Google was rated the top company to work for in 2012, and Blumenthal cites strong benefits and perks, and the way Google “offers opportunities to change the world.”
His biggest challenges and rewards on the job? “Scale, for both,” he answers. “When thinking about problems and solutions, the scale is always amazing. The problem most likely doesn’t impact a few people, but rather thousands or even millions of people. That is a pretty tall order to think about; however, the reward is just as big — if not bigger.”
Blumenthal values the teamwork he learned while at Clark. “While my computer science and mathematics majors provided the necessary foundation and fundamentals, I’ve found that academic course work is nothing like corporate and commercial software engineering. However, I’m still using the teamwork and group skills that I learned from doing research with Professor Li Han and group projects in advanced math courses with Professor Natalia Sternberg.”
His future plans include continuing to challenge himself at Google. “I see endless ways of growing my career as a software engineer. Technology is always changing and there is always room to grow.”
When asked to recall the most exciting thing to happen to him both at Clark and after Clark, Blumenthal had only one answer: “I met my future wife at Clark (Katie Spencer ’05), and we were married this past October.”