Sep 2006 – Oct 2008 · 2 yrs 1 mo · St Louis, Missouri, United States

• Managed the F5 relationship, working case review with the support staff, expansion and new product opportunities with the sales team, and coordinating executive feedback loops with our own leadership team. Designed branch VPN HA solution as well as the new corporate B2B/B2C VPN solution, which required (in addition to several Cisco IOS bugs discovered and fixed) a fairly complex OSPF/iBGP redistribution between our DMZ and datacenter networks.

Nov 2004 – Sep 2006 · 1 yr 10 mos · St Louis, Missouri, United States

• I was hired to evaluate and select the next-gen application delivery controller, and upon selection, design the implementation and prepare the operations team for deployment. Other projects included firewall and branch VPN updates and lifecycle management tasks.

Apr 2002 – Oct 2004 · 2 yrs 6 mos · Scott AFB, Illinois, United States

• This role introduced me to F5 BIG-IP. My primary responsibilities included the design and operational readiness of our application delivery architecture, and escalation contacts from the NOC during outages and maintenance windows. I also maintained firewalls and designed the L2/L3 infrastructure in each of our regional pods for the DoD program I was responsible for.

Sep 1999 – Dec 2001 · 2 yrs 3 mos · St Louis, Missouri, United States

• CoreExpress was a start-up company deploying DWDM optical carrier equipment on 20,000 miles of dark fiber to light 50G of traffic to sell bandwidth at retail while we promoted our differentiating products at layer 3: a VPN extranet to tie business endpoints together and provide B2B connectivity while guaranteeing traffic end-to-end. My role early on was whatever was necessary from helping on the corp IT side of things to assisting the engineering team with design validation, training, and operational deployments. After we were operational, I worked in the operational engineering team to deploy/troubleshoot at all layers of the network, including our DWDM, Sonnet, L2/L3 switching and routing, and DNS. I also built and maintained the operational readiness testing for our specific deployment so our NOC staff was well prepared beyond protocol and equipment specifics to identify and resolve issues quickly.

May 1997 – Aug 1999 · 2 yrs 3 mos · St Louis, Missouri, United States

• I actually worked at three different companies for this role: Critical Technologies, Savvis, and Bridge Information Systems, but they're all rolled up into my Savvis journey. I started in the NOC managing outages and troubleshooting frame-relay and ATM issues with our client connections, and eventually moved into the TAC engineering group to work on backbone BGP issues and support the NOC with escalations. I was mentored in this role by two coworkers who passed on their passion for being teachers--something I have carried forward in every role I've taken since.