My Last Day on Mars (Incorporated)

Today – Friday, April 30, 2021, was my last day with Mars Incorporated.

I started my journey as a Martian on Tuesday, October 16, 2007, at the Mars Information Services building located in Mount Olive, New Jersey.

I had spent the previous seven years working for IBM (as my first career job out of college) supporting the Internal IBM Account and then AMEX. I was going to be working for the IT segment of a CPG company. How different could the day to day really be?

Looking back, I can say that I walked in that day having no clue how different the next 13 years, 6 months and 15 days would be.

My third week was spent across the pond in the UK and France meeting with extended team members and building my network. Did I mention this was my first international trip outside of the US?

I was part of the small team that led the company’s digital transformation of legacy technology like Lotus Notes to Office 365 (SharePoint Online). I drove the technical implementation and user adoption strategy for Yammer (and other less popular products before) across the company.

My last roles (Cloud Engineer to Cloud Solution Architect) had me at the forefront to bring the cloud to Mars. I was part of the small team on the ground floor building the first cloud data center in Microsoft Azure. We proceeded to migrate infrastructure and applications out of the Mount Olive DC (the building I worked in) rather than invest to update on-premises. IaaS quickly led to PaaS and Serverless solutions. Azure led to smaller initiatives in AWS and GCP.

I have had the honor of working with some truly exceptional associates every step of the way. Thank you for making my career journey all that it was. While my time at Mars may not have always been exactly what I imagined; I appreciate it for all that it was.

I am sad to close the door on this chapter of my career as the decision to leave was not my own. Thanks to Mars for doing right by me and my family over the years and through this process. I will always be proud to say that I was part of such an incredible organization.

I’ll be taking the next two weeks off to enjoy time with my family before starting my next role with Microsoft as a Sr. Customer Engineer working for the Customer Success Unit supporting customers in the US Manufacturing Sector.