Burgess ponders next destination in fascinating career journey

For most of us, the prospect of reaching a career crossroads is something to be concerned about, as it often marks the beginning of a period of financial and psychological anxiety.

For Assiniboine grad Ryan Burgess, however, the crossroads he has reached is a sign of accomplishment, the threshold to even more challenging and rewarding experiences to add to his remarkable career journey that began 20 years ago in a classroom at the Victoria Avenue campus.

Ryan entered the college’s web design program in 2004. Two years later, he was doing his practicum with Manlab, a small agency in Winnipeg. “You had to do a practicum, which was cool,” he says. “That was probably one of the best parts of it, because you’re actually getting real-world experience, not just theoretical projects and things that you’re doing in class.”

That practicum experience led to a full-time job with Manlab. Two years later, Ryan and his wife moved to Kingston, Ontario and, one year later, to Toronto.

“I worked for the Ontario government for a bit, building websites and applications that they needed,” he says. “After that, I went and worked for a fairly large consulting firm called CGI. They do a lot of networking and technology. They have massive clients like Telus, Bell, Rogers, Canadian banks like Scotiabank, TD, you name it.”

“They were doing a lot of work for large clients,” he says, “and they wanted to start a smaller interactive agency within, because a lot of their clients were wanting more web-based applications. They weren’t doing that at the time, so I got to join in that fairly early and we were basically like a small start-up within this large company. I really enjoyed that, doing a lot of work for serious clients.”

Ryan then went to another agency in Toronto, called Nurun. “I loved working there,” he says, “doing a lot of e-commerce stuff for, like, Walmart, Home Depot, Target – various businesses like that. But I wasn’t there that long. My wife and I decided to move out to San Francisco, to be in Silicon Valley, where there were a lot more of the jobs I wanted to be doing.”

That’s when Ryan’s career really began to take off.

“I joined a start-up called Evernote,“ he says. “I was a software engineer, building a lot of web applications, doing a lot of front-end work. For about a year, I was a lead front-end engineer, and then they put into management. So, I was building a team and managing the team, and then I decided that I needed a change. Netflix had been bugging me to join them for awhile, so I did end up going to Netflix and being an engineering manager. I worked with various teams at Netflix, all focused within engineering.”

“The first team I was working on at Netflix was the ‘acquisition UI team’. Essentially, we implemented all the sign-in flows for mobile phones, the web and TV. So basically, anyone who has ever used Netflix has touched something that we built.”

After more than eight at Netflix, however, Ryan felt it was time for a change. “At the end of 2023, I decided that I would be taking a break,” he says. “I’m kind of on early retirement. I’m forcing myself to at least take a year, to decide what I want to do next.”

“I loved my job so much at Netflix that I was like ‘I want something different, but what is it?’... So, taking the time, I’m hoping to figure what that is. Is it going to maybe a start-up? I’m very interested in the direction that we’re going with AI, so maybe it’s going to a start-up and doing that. I’m not sure, though... It’s an interesting spot, where I don’t have a solid answer.”

While Ryan ponders his next move, he reminds himself that “You can’t go into a job thinking you know everything. This is a constant learning journey. I’m constantly learning and accepting and enjoying that aspect. Iterating and learning, making mistakes and learning from them, is just so, so important.

“You learn from all those mistakes and grow. ‘Learn by doing’ is on point.”