Meet Your Operation Code Tech Mentors Panel

Four Operation Code tech mentors share their stories about military service, transition to tech careers, their challenges and tips for success. Bring your questions! Bios of our panelists below:

Amber Kim - U.S. military spouse

Amber Kim is a military spouse and a software engineer. She enjoys thinking about how people and applications work together. Amber thinks the best part of building applications is the process of collaborating with a team to identify a problem, figure out different solutions how to solve it, to watch your ideas come to life through implementation, and celebrate team accomplishments together.

Having gone through a non-traditional path to becoming a senior software engineer, Amber believes in the impact of people empowering each other. She notes that she received the privilege of being mentored by many amazing people and is thankful for the opportunity to pay it forward.

Marc Gall - U.S. Army Veteran

Marcus (Marc) Gall is a senior business analyst, Alexa US Customer Experience. He uses the vast databases storing customer interactions with Alexa to track down problems, identify root causes and work with the product owners to implement fixes. This requires a deep understanding of how Alexa operates from ASR/NLU modeling through intent routing and responses. Marc has also helped demystify complex NLP classifier models used to detect customer defects and make their outputs understandable to non-technical product and program managers. Marc started at Amazon as an investigator and worked his way up to senior analyst by quickly picking up new skills, identifying and solving complex problems and never saying ‘no’ to a difficult assignment. Marc is always excited to help people interested in data analysis get started in the field.

Mario Morales - U.S. Marine Corps Veteran

Mario Morales is a passionate Production Engineer at Meta Platform's Data Center and Artificial Intelligence Networks, where he leverages his extensive software development background and sharp data analysis skills to optimize fault management on a massive scale. His work drives efficiency and reliability improvements within the organization.

When he isn't busy building one of the world's most extensive networks, you can find Mario enjoying quality time with a loving partner, two wonderful children, and their furry companion, Maxie, in the south SF Bay Area or in the tropical Ryukyu islands.

Todd Baur - U.S. Marine Corps Veteran

Todd Baur is a seasoned technology leader with an expansive background in software development, user interface design, and system administration. With over two decades of experience, Todd has significantly contributed to a range of sectors, including government services, startup ecosystems, and corporate settings. As a Senior Individual Contributor at Koniag Government Services since January 2020, he has enhanced the Department of Labor's ECOMP platform, notably increasing claims processing efficiency sixfold.

Todd's entrepreneurial spirit is evident from founding Now Serving, a social networking site for food enthusiasts and restaurant owners, and his time as a contractor, where he developed impactful technology solutions for companies like Tesla Motors and StubHub. His commitment to community service is shown through his ongoing volunteer work with organizations like People Assisting The Homeless and mentoring in the Lego Robotics Club. Todd's diverse skill set is complemented by his certifications in AWS, CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+, alongside his degrees in Business Management and Computer Science from the University of Phoenix and Arizona Western College, respectively.