Jonathan Kenyon

Cover Letter

To whom it may concern,

I am applying for the position of Security Software Engineer II - Azure Red Team. I have never had a job description pique my interest quite like this one. Being paid to find the weakest points in a system and work my hardest to break in is fascinating.

From childhood, I have always tried to understand how every system around me works. In one instance during 4th grade, I accidentally shut down the entire network for my elementary school through the use of a command line. Rather than thank me for my discovery of a vulnerability, however, I was banned from computers in the lab for the rest of the year. My final PowerPoint presentation was the only one to be presented to the class using a traditional easel and construction paper.

But that hasn’t deterred me from trying to understand every system around me. I actively seek out new technologies the take apart and understand. Whether it’s software or hardware, I am deeply curious and always looking to find new areas to explore.

My professional experience may not stand out as a seasoned developer, but I have experience in every platform and technology listed in the job posting. Ironically, my weakest area is Azure specifically, but I believe in my ability to get up to speed quickly. To quote one of my colleagues:

Jonny’s overwhelming strength is his ability to dive headfirst into a problem space he’s unfamiliar with and map it out, understand it, and begin implementing novel solutions to address the problems.

Beyond just looking to understand a system, I seek to understand quickly. In one instance, a major shipping company had a developer leave the company and needed me to update their web system. With no documentation on any piece of the project, except for the name of a piece of software and some SSH passwords, I was able to piece together and document an entire COBOL system which generated static HTML files from within a database and put them into the required folders.

I did it in 2 weeks.

In my line of professional work, I am faced every day with novel new ways that software systems have fallen apart or quit working. My constant exposure to failing systems has given me keen insight into the pain points of any given system. While my initial guess may be off, it is more often than not in the general vicinity of where the true problem lies.

I truly believe that your team would benefit from my help, and that I would find the work personally enriching and rewarding. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kenyon