Professional Summary
Director of IT with over 20 years of experience leading enterprise infrastructure, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), and security operations - scaling technology from an early-stage startup to a unicorn-valued company. Proven track record building high-performing teams, driving DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) adoption, and aligning technology investments with business objectives. Played a key leadership role in achieving SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications while strengthening security, disaster recovery, and IT governance across high-growth SaaS environments.
Professional Experience
Director, Infrastructure Engineering
July 2022 - Present
Age of Learning, Inc.
- Define and execute enterprise infrastructure strategy, aligning technology investments, cloud architecture, security, and operational priorities with business growth and organizational objectives.
- Lead Infrastructure Engineering, Network Operations, Help Desk, and IT Operations teams supporting a ~200-employee SaaS organization following organizational restructuring, developing high-performing teams while improving service delivery and operational maturity.
- Own the hybrid multi-cloud environment spanning AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises infrastructure, ensuring highly available, secure, and scalable platforms supporting production systems and business operations.
- Partner with executive leadership, Engineering, Security, and Finance to evaluate $15.5M in technology investments, modernizing enterprise systems and improving operational efficiency by 25%.
- Drive enterprise AI adoption by leading the implementation of AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, establishing governance and automation strategies that reduce manual effort and accelerate research and internal workflows.
- Play a leadership role in achieving and maintaining SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications by partnering with Security and Compliance teams to integrate security controls, governance, and audit readiness into day-to-day operations.
- Architected and led enterprise migration of 1,000 VMs across 20 physical hosts from VMware to Proxmox VE, avoiding a 500% licensing cost increase while maintaining infrastructure resiliency and performance.
- Own $12.9M annual IT infrastructure operating budget and a portfolio of 25+ hosting, hardware, and core infrastructure software vendors, negotiating contracts that reduced costs by 15% while improving service quality.
- Develop operational dashboards, KPIs, and SLA reporting that provide executive leadership with visibility into infrastructure performance, service quality, and organizational health.
- Lead Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning, testing, and documentation to strengthen organizational resilience and minimize operational risk.
- Led deployment of Moveworks AI chatbot within Slack to triage first-level Help Desk requests, reducing ticket creation by 35% and accelerating employee support response times.
Senior Manager, Infrastructure Engineering
July 2021 - July 2022
- Promoted to lead enterprise infrastructure initiatives for a 14-person team spanning 3 functional groups, driving technology modernization that supported 20% company growth.
- Built the company's Disaster Recovery program from the ground up in preparation for SOC 2 certification, establishing DR planning, testing, and documentation where none previously existed.
- Partnered with Engineering and DevOps teams to enable self-service infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation), empowering developers to provision environments independently and reducing environment setup time by 50%.
- Collaborated with cross-functional Engineering, Product, and Security teams to scale infrastructure supporting a platform serving 1M+ paying subscribers, enabling 99.9%+ platform uptime during peak subscriber traffic.
Manager, Infrastructure Engineering
September 2019 - July 2021
- Managed infrastructure engineering operations, cloud initiatives, and enterprise systems supporting mission-critical services.
- Assumed leadership of the Help Desk function and architected zero-touch device deployment models for company Macs (JAMF and Apple Business Manager) and PCs (Microsoft Intune), reducing new-hire onboarding from a 1-hour manual process to a 20-minute automated workflow and eliminating an estimated 208 work hours per year in manual imaging - a critical capability for supporting a distributed, work-from-home workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Modernized Help Desk operations by automating Snowflake user provisioning through Okta Lifecycle Management, reducing processing time from 30 minutes to approximately 2 minutes, and launched a Slack-based self-service bot for Datadog and AWS sandbox access, reducing manual ticket volume and improving employee self-sufficiency.
- Migrated source control infrastructure from a single on-premises GitLab instance to a globally distributed architecture, deploying GitLab GEO replication nodes across 2 AWS regions and 10 product accounts to reduce pull latency for engineering teams and provide failover redundancy.
- Automated server provisioning and configuration management using Ansible and AWX Tower, reducing manual deployment time by 50% and improving consistency across enterprise infrastructure.
Senior Systems Engineer
May 2014 - September 2019
- Joined as employee #150 and helped scale the organization from an early-stage startup to a unicorn-valued company, growing the corporate footprint from a single floor to 5 floors and supporting up to 800 employees.
- Led the transition from a legacy Dell server, RAID controller, and switch environment to an enterprise-grade technology stack built on VMware, Cisco servers and switches, and NetApp storage, establishing the infrastructure foundation for company-wide scaling.
- Stood up the company's first Network Operations Center (NOC) team, establishing monitoring, first-level issue triage, and on-call escalation processes; developed documentation and playbooks and implemented Datadog alert tagging for prioritization and escalation.
- Architected and supported enterprise infrastructure, AWS cloud environments, and automation initiatives that improved platform availability and performance.
Systems Administrator
January 2012 - May 2014
Oversee.net
- Administered more than 1,000 Linux servers across VMware virtual environments and physical infrastructure.
- Managed NetApp enterprise storage systems, Citrix NetScalers, and Scale clusters supporting production workloads.
- Designed and implemented Amazon EC2 cloud production environments to support scalable application deployments.
- Led the upgrade and audit of a Nagios monitoring environment, reviewing over 5,000 alerts and improving operational visibility.
- Orchestrated migration from legacy Foundry switches to Cisco Nexus 5000 infrastructure with fabric extenders.
Core Competencies
Leadership & Strategy: IT Strategy, IT Governance, Executive Leadership, Cross-Functional Leadership, Vendor Management, IT OPEX Budgeting, P&L Ownership, Technology Roadmaps, Digital Transformation
Security & Compliance: SOC 2, ISO 27001, Security Governance, Risk Management, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Compliance
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, GCP, Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Enterprise Infrastructure, Systems Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, VMware, Proxmox VE, Data Center Operations
AI, Automation & DevOps: AI Strategy, AI Governance, AI Adoption, AI Agents, MCP Servers, DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Workflow Automation, Ansible, AWX Tower, AWS CloudFormation, GitLab
Storage & DR: NetApp Enterprise Storage, SAN (Brocade), NFS/SMB, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery
Operating Systems: Linux (RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian), Solaris, Windows, macOS
Networking & Tools: TCP/IP, DNS, SMTP, HTTP, VoIP, Datadog, Nagios, LibreNMS/Observium, Git/GitHub/GitLab
Education & Certifications
B.S., Telecommunications Engineering Technology - ITT Technical Institute, Oxnard, CA
Military Service
U.S. Navy Veteran, 26 Years of Honorable Service