Jonathan Leblang '89

I have been able to build on my engineering and computer science backgrounds throughout my career. I started my career at MITRE in northern Virginia, where I attended the (still very small) northern Virginia campus in the evenings for my master's. I worked on a variety of large, complex government systems, but always had an interest in the nascent Arpanet (my first email was jonathan@mitre.arpa). A friend asked me to take a look at a site he was developing, and I became the first beta tester of (and found the first bug on) Amazon.com.

The dual perspective of my Virginia Tech background in electrical engineering and computer science and applications gave me the tools to look at complex problems from different perspectives and take a variety of approaches to find and solve problems. Electrical engineering is where I learned to look at things more at a low-level component level, while computer science is where I learned to look at the entirety of a system (including the humans).

After  23 years, I retired from Amazon, where I’d been a director of product management. I saw the company grow from about 1,000 people to now over a million people, and from selling books to selling pretty much everything (including computer services). The first product I launched, wish list, is one of the most-used features on Amazon. Over the years, I've been fortunate to have worked across the company on products as diverse as payments, search, Kindle, Alexa, and Amazon Web Services. 

Personally, I’ve lived in Menlo Park, California, halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, for the past 22 years. My wife and my two college-age sons love to travel, and we've visited more than 30 countries so far.