CATLab Blog Alumni Profiles: Jonathan Lee

For the second installment of our CATLab Alumni Profiles, we spoke with Jonathan Lee ’21, a member of CATLab in 2019, about his current career in the software industry. He shared his experiences as well as his advice for students about to graduate and launch their own careers in the technology and software fields.

Jonathan currently works as a customer success engineer at Algolia, a company that provides AI-powered search and recommendation features for websites and applications across various industries. After customers purchase Algolia’s products, Jonathan handles both short-term onboarding and long-term account management and solution design. He notes that this sort of customer success role can come with unique challenges: “At the end of the day,” he says, “I’m there to advocate for the customers and to make our customers successful, but I also have to balance that with the company’s objectives and what the company wants to achieve. You’re trying to make sure that both sides can see the vision you’re trying to outline for them and realize that.”

While Jonathan has found success in his current role, his career journey has already taken some unexpected turns. When he graduated from Westmont, he took a software engineering job. While he knew that he didn’t want to make a career out of software engineering---he wanted to be a product manager---he took an opportunity in front of him instead of holding out for exactly what he envisioned as a “dream job.” That choice paid off: Jonathan says that the opportunity he had to be a software engineer on a small team gave him a lot of autonomy and the opportunity to lead projects, both of which prepared him well for his current role.

While Jonathan was at Westmont, he worked on the (at the time) brand-new Salesforce-based admissions application---one of the most important pieces of Westmont’s software landscape. Jonathan says that this project taught him how to bring together various resources to complete a project. “A lot of my job today is bringing together resources and people and the internet as well as being able to research and find solutions. So I think that’s what CATLab taught me: scrappiness! Being confident that I can deliver something.”

Jonathan believes that real-world application of skills should be at the heart of what CATLab does for students: “I think the most impactful thing CATLab can do,” he says, “is provide students the opportunities to deliver tangible, real-world solutions. That is an incredible experience. It’s great to be able to contribute to projects that are actually going to be utilized in a real environment; students are able to interact with technologies that are utilized very commonly in the workforce.”

When asked to give advice to students about to enter the workforce for the first time, Jonathan had this to say: “You can have a role or title in mind that you want, and you can definitely get there right out of school if you wanted to, but you might not, and it’s fine. I work with so many people who started their career in one place and went somewhere else. When you’re a senior in college--I kind of felt like ‘this is my last chance to get into the career I want to!’ But the thing about the tech world is that it’s very fluid. I see a lot of people moving around. In my own career, I moved from software engineering to this more customer engineering role. Sometimes taking an opportunity outside of the title you’re looking for might give you more growth and provide you with a better foundation to maybe get there one day. Don’t be obsessed with a title. Be obsessed with opportunities to learn.”