Career Highlight

Experience Gained

Senior Azure Engineer (2022 – Present)
At my current position for Soteria 365 LLC, I am a Senior Azure Engineer responsible for the design, deployment, documentation, and maintenance of multiple Azure-based infrastructures. I am the lead architect for multiple environments/projects and have built out said environments from scratch to comply with business and security needs. I was also responsible for the design and implementation of a highly-available and scalable Kubernetes-based environment used to query many millions of rows of databases.

As a senior engineer, I am responsible for leading a small group of other engineers and aiding them when necessary. I mentor and train them while honing their skills to eventually be in my position some day. I lead daily scrum calls and participate in DevOps meetings to manage/track work items across multiple tenants.

I have ongoing duties to oversee existing environments and make improvements to everything from Security scores to Conditional Access policies, to cost management. I regularly meet with business owners to discuss, plan, and implement new components for their daily operations.

Cloud Operations Engineer (Level 2) (2021 – 2022)
My position at PBI involved providing level 1 – 3 support across both US and UK clients on cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, and GCP. I use the Jira ticketing system to manage support tickets within SLAs, escalation internally or with third parties, and daily reporting. We primarily use Zabbix to monitor cloud and on-prem infrastructure for our hedge fund and asset manager clients.

I play a lead role in supporting infrastructure and day-to-day needs of over 40 financial clients using a combination of ManageEngine Desktop Central, Mimecast, O365/Azure AD, Fortigate management, and Citrix Cloud. Strives to improve day to day operations to reduce support to zero. Maintains detailed documentation of environments and procedures within a Confluence/Atlassian environment. Is the technical lead for the US-based team for all Linux-related questions/issues.

When time allows, I’ve also been tasked with creating PowerShell scripts that run in Azure Runbooks for automated reporting and remediation of issues such as user licensing and provisioning, user mailbox utilization, and others.

I routinely assist and mentor fellow engineers, and provide advanced support for escalated tickets. I frequently create walkthroughs, how-tos, and hosts learning sessions for team members to advance their knowledge in fields they may not be fully confident in.

Systems Engineer II (2019 – 2021)
As part of the Systems Operations team, I wear many hats depending on the day. Primarily, I focus on SCCM deployments, PowerShell scripting for various tasks such as O365 group memberships and distribution lists, and Identity and Access Management (IAM). I have learned much about Microsoft Visio as I have played a large role in gathering business requirements for our Master Data Management migration project.

Systems Administrator (2015 – 2019)
For just under 5 years, I held a position at Tufts University as a Systems Administrator. Specifically, I was THE Windows administrator for both the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments. This was a small group dedicated to these departments which primarily used RedHat Enterprise Linux. I worked extensively with Linux alongside Windows and configured and managed RedHat’s Password Sync tool. After 2 VMware classes, I became the lead architect and manager of the VMware infrastructure for the departments. They’re still using my infrastructure today, which includes all the ESXi hosts, distributed switches and network configuration, storage configuration, and more.

Network / PowerON Specialist (2011 – 2015)
My first full-time job was at Webster First Federal Credit Union as a Network Specialist. I was the sole IT support for their Greater Boston branches which included Saugus, Winthrop, and downtown Boston. I managed all computers, software installs, user access, printers and interfaces for all branches. My largest project was to overhaul, upgrade, and enhance their Symantec Backup Exec system for their tape drives. Later on, I took PowerON programming classes and became their in-house PowerON programmer. PowerON is COBOL-esque and is the code used to tie Bank applications and forms to information in the database.

IT Technician (2007 – 2011)
I began my IT career my first day of freshman year of college at Worcester State University when I approached their campus Help Desk asking for a job. I began by working on hardware/software repairs for student/faculty/staff computers. Tasks included replacing computer hardware, removing viruses, and troubleshooting issues.

Basic Troubleshooting | End User Support | Hardware & Software Support | Active Directory Users & Groups | Puppy Linux

In My Free Time
I’m always looking to learn more and new technologies to help strengthen my career, and I’m a pretty big geek so tech stuff is always cool to me. Outside of work, I have taught myself numerous programming languages and experienced many different technologies. While I may be out of practice for some, it wouldn’t take long to get back into them now that I’ve done it once.

I have built websites and forums with Drupal / WordPress / HTML / CSS. I have built / customized / managed AJAX-based chat rooms. I have built Objective-C based apps on Apple. I’ve taught myself Photoshop / Illustrator for my amateur photography endeavors involved with those sites. I learned rudimentary skills in Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects when attempting (and failing) to start up a YouTube channel.

I taught myself how to create Android Apps in Android Studio that use a combination of Java and XML. The apps utilized either Amazon Dynamo DB or Google Firebase for back-end databases. I learned basic Node.js to enable push-notifications for the apps as well. I also learned that trademarking a logo with the United States Patent and Trademark Office by yourself is quite the undertaking. More recently, I’ve begun playing with Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and making little widgets for myself.

I’ve also come to realize I am far more capable of leading others than I first thought. As lame as it may sound, I have been the founder and leader of multiple clubs / groups / guilds in both life and through video games. I founded a New England-based Mazda group (before moving to a new state) that had over 200 members and I would schedule and host many meet ups each year. I also founded a few guilds for video games, one of which has over 500 members. I found myself mentoring many others while planning exciting events for us to all enjoy our time together.