I'm Mason.
I'm a Minneapolis based Software Engineer. I'm passionate about building things that work.
When I'm not gaslighting Claude, you might find me staring at my Venus Flytrap,
hoping it survives the winter. I'm excited to share my portfolio with you!
About me
Software Engineer III at Pearson. I ship in the legacy systems nobody else wants to touch, and I spend the rest of my time helping the engineers around me move faster with AI. I love asking questions that make engineers' eyes light up.
- Study:University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
- Location:Minneapolis, MN
- Interests:Cooking, Coffee, Puppy Dogs
- Employment:Pearson
- Music:Simon & Garfunkel Enthusiast
- Fav Podcast:Lex Fridman
Work
Software Engineer III
Lead AI adoption across a 100-engineer organization: an 8-video internal series on real-world agentic workflows, now driving adoption by 20+ engineers including four dev leads and two architects.
Rebuilt the dependency-update workflow around AI tooling, cutting engineering spend from 43 to 5 hours per week and shipping security fixes twice as fast.
Software Engineer
Delivered a zero-downtime modernization of a business-critical portal, splitting a monolithic Tomcat application into a CDN-delivered frontend and Kubernetes services: 40 integrated applications across a dozen teams, $96K/year in cloud savings.
Redesigned defect triage across the dev team for 25% faster resolution and 45% fewer customer escalations.
Associate Software Engineer
Spearheaded Pearson's enterprise Azure migration from IaC design through production cutover, cutting infrastructure costs 20% while holding 99.7% availability across 10,000+ global test centers. Automated FedRAMP vulnerability remediation for 65% faster time-to-resolution, unlocking $7M in federal contracts.
Cloud SWE Intern
Designed and implemented feature allowing customers to configure their own data storage policies to improve price negotiablility. Used Kotlin, Spring Boot, Terraform, Docker, and various AWS Services
Education
B.S. Computer Science
Favorite Classes: Software Design, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
I have a minor in chemistry thanks to Breaking Bad. Ask me for a chemistry joke!
Skills
Check out some of my projects
Mason was a natural, I didn't even know he was in this class!
-- Discrete Math Professor
Never let the magic smoke out of the PC. Once it escapes, it's really hard to put it back.
-- Mike Zarns
One time I saw him spend two hours googling which brand of canned air was best to clean a pc with. He's nuts.
-- Anonymous
He keeps muttering "Theres no place like 127.0.0.1" over and over again. I'm worried about him.
-- Elon Tusk
Recommended Reads:
Get in touch.
- mason@zarns.net
- Github
- github.com/zarns
- mason-zarns
- Location
- Minneapolis, MN