Associate Director · Director · Senior Director opportunities
Associate Director, IT Strategy & Operations, Verizon, 2013 to 2026 · 27 years in technology
I ran IT operations for systems that can't go down. At Verizon I led a 36-person global team and a $5M portfolio supporting 2,000+ users and 110+ mission-critical workloads. I held four roles there over 13 years and came up through 14 years of field engineering at Nortel and Avaya.
As Senior Manager I audited the stack and removed redundant licenses and overlapping contracts across 3 vendors. As Associate Director, usage audits and automated right-sizing cut cloud and infrastructure spend 25%. I also moved multi-million-dollar infrastructure budgets from CapEx to OpEx.
I led P1 to P3 response and the customer, business and executive escalations across 110+ workloads, along with incident, problem, change and configuration governance.
Governance and review frameworks, run on set accountability cadences, drove the drop across the same 110+ workloads.
Quarterly executive business reviews and contract risk scoring kept vendors accountable on a $5M portfolio. Vendor ticket resolution time improved 17%.
Standardized CI/CD and automated deployment cut lead time 67% and raised delivery capacity 30%. Scrum and Kanban across engineering, QA and operations lifted release throughput 200%+.
I built disaster recovery and business continuity practices from runbooks and regular testing. Mission-critical services reached 99.9% availability.
27 years in technology. 14 in field engineering, then 13 at Verizon through four roles.
Scope. 110+ mission-critical conversational AI and backend workloads handling millions of real-time transactions.
What I did. Directed the migration to AWS (Lambda, EC2, EKS, Bedrock, SQS, RDS) with blue-green deployments and active-active failover. Set the roadmap to move the monolithic IVR systems to microservices on AWS and GCP.
Outcome. 99.99% availability in production and staging, about 52 minutes of downtime a year.
Scope. Licenses and third-party contracts across the technology stack, then cloud and infrastructure usage.
What I did. As Senior Manager, audited the stack and removed redundant licenses and overlapping contracts. As Associate Director, ran FinOps usage audits and automated right-sizing.
Outcome. $1.2M a year saved across 3 vendor contracts, then a 25% cut in annual cloud and infrastructure spend.
Scope. Enterprise ITSM, CMDB and ITOM Service Mapping, then monitoring and reporting across 110+ workloads.
What I did. Led the ServiceNow implementation and mapped 100+ business services from application to infrastructure. Later built Grafana monitoring on Elasticsearch and directed the teams that implemented application tracing.
Outcome. Responders could follow a request through each service during an incident. Executive dashboards replaced spreadsheet reporting and cut monthly report prep 63%.
I came up through field engineering, so I know the work at the engineer level. At Verizon I moved through four roles in 13 years. I briefed executives on risk and cost tradeoffs and held one roadmap across cloud migration, application modernization, monitoring, ITSM, security governance and FinOps. On-time delivery rose 25% and operational efficiency 12%.
Hybrid and multi-cloud on AWS and GCP, data center operations, and VMware across 1,000+ hosts in Sacramento, Twinsburg and Tampa with zero facility-level outages.
Grafana on Elasticsearch with threshold alerting and anomaly detection. My teams implemented application tracing so responders could follow a request through each service.
ServiceNow ITSM, CMDB and ITOM Service Mapping. ITIL incident, problem, change and release management. Disaster recovery that cut recovery time 40%.
Five vendors on a $5M portfolio, usage audits and right-sizing, and $1.2M a year removed from redundant licenses and contracts.
Terraform, CloudFormation and Ansible replaced manual provisioning. Standardized CI/CD cut release lead time from 3 weeks to 1.
A 36-person global team. I developed and promoted 6 engineers. Executive dashboards for KPIs, SLA performance and risk cut monthly report prep 63%.
Computer Electronics Technician Certification, Computer Processing Institute.
Introduction to Generative AI and Introduction to Large Language Models, Google Cloud Skills Boost.