Sabio Fellow's Stellar Career Path Leads to Amazon Web Services Job to Help Developers Thrive
Life as a Senior Developer Advocate for Amazon Web Services comes with plenty of perks and responsibilities. The job is as important as it sounds, revolving around speaking to developers, teaching them and fighting for them internally when it comes to new features or services. This renowned and coveted job at AWS belongs to none other than Nicki K, who among many other things, is one of Sabio’s first alum’s.
Nicki, just 28 and originally from Orange County has had quite the ride as a software engineer. She’s worked in both web and mobile development, AI and cloud development, along with the budding new tech beast, Blockchain. But there was a time when Nicki was as fresh to the tech industry as ever. As a child she found herself interested in tech, but never saw a career in it. After completing her BA at UCLA in linguistics and psychology, Nicki went from working at the Apple Genius Bar to the stock market, “which completely bored me. I started to tinker with the idea of developing toys that I played with as a child. So I started looking for jobs that involve building and consoling, so naturally when I was googling, coding came up.”
For Nicki, it was only a year and a half went by after Sabio before things got really exciting. She came first place at the Launch Hackathon, one of the largest hackathons in the country, giving her the seed money to start her lifelong dream of running her own company. And run it she did, at its top BetaGig was valued at 2 million dollars, an achievement she greatly credits her Sabio mentors too. “They’re founders of a start up themselves and they had tons of advice. They went out of their way to connect me with individuals that could help me or drive my company further down the road.”
BetaGig, Nicki’s company thrived for its two years in service based off of Nicki’s experience in the job market. A, ‘try before you by,’ for careers, allowing individuals to connect with companies for a job shadow or a “working day interview,” to see what a day in the life was like before actually getting and/or accepting a job.
