Senior IT Operations Leader

This is where I learned that effective IT support operations drive a business rather than merely supporting it. I started at Shilo Inns in 2007 as a junior sysadmin at a time when the entire company, encompassing all 40 hotels, was still relying on Windows 98, an AS/400 mainframe, and SCO Unix boxes that dialed home every night. Over five years, I completely overhauled the system while finishing my computer science degree. I deployed a Microsoft stack driven .NET property management system over an MPLS WAN, managed thin clients remotely, established real backups, and executed a comprehensive payments overhaul.

I redesigned how every property processed payments, from the processor to the card reader integrated into the keyboard, gaining a profound understanding of payment processing, integration, and PCI-DSS compliance that most IT professionals never achieve. I also developed the business-critical reporting that owners and executives relied on to run the company, the kind of board-level reporting I've been trusted with ever since. By the end of my tenure, I was the Director of IT, overseeing data center management and leading an in-house team to create a responsive website that still thrives today, more than a decade later, as part of our SaaS portfolio management.

I managed data center operations that other companies rely on, even as the cloud transformed the landscape. At Peak Hosting, UnitedLayer, and Xtreme Consulting, I directed IT support operations with a remarkable 99.99% uptime and established compliance frameworks for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA across facilities in the US and India. I led a VMware migration involving over 1,000 assets for a major healthcare client, achieving 100% uptime. When Peak Hosting closed, I was promoted during the crisis, overseeing every customer migration to partner data centers with zero data loss. High regulation environments are where I excel, particularly in data center management.

The work that energizes me most is building support organizations and growing the people inside them. EIS was my career-defining example in data center management. I built complete operational infrastructure from zero for a $100M+ SaaS portfolio management, wired seven systems into one observability pipeline, and developed PowerBI dashboards and KPIs that provided everyone from agents to executives with a single source of truth. My VP remarked that "there are very few people in the world that could have accomplished this." At NAVEX, I ran the same playbook in IT support operations, creating dashboards that cut resolution time in half. I was building these systems long before AI, and now I lean on it to push further. But systems are only half of it. Through steady coaching and one-on-ones, I turn teammates into standout performers and build stronger teams around them.

Some of my most demanding work has lived inside regulated walls, and that's exactly where I'm most comfortable. At Clinicient, I managed IT support operations for an EMR platform serving over 4,000 healthcare customers, with HIPAA governing every interaction and HL7 and EDI facilitating the movement of protected health information between providers and insurers. EIS placed me within the insurance sector, emphasizing data center management built on SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS standards. NAVEX immersed me in governance, risk, and compliance itself. To me, compliance has never felt like a constraint; rather, it forms the foundation upon which I build, especially in the realm of SaaS portfolio management.