nikolasarmendariz.com Resume · 2026

Nikolas Armendariz

Case Triage Frameworks | Support Intelligence | KCS Coach | AI-Assisted Case Analytics

Minneapolis, MN ● ⭐ Connect on LinkedIn
Who is this guy?

My professional career spans 16 years in enterprise technical support, storage and observability. At Cisco/Splunk I mentored and coached a global team supporting Splunk Observability Cloud and built the support intelligence function from scratch — joining Salesforce case data, the Jira backlog and engineering resolution data to show how much escalation volume and headache could have been avoided. As manual review of thousands of cases became less sustainable, I built LLM classification workflows that did the tagging within parameters I validated by hand and through scripting. That output became the triage framework leadership has since adopted. I was also a KCS coach and article approver for Splunk Observability Support, setting the publish bar for my team's knowledge base. Deep expertise in observability platforms (Splunk, OpenTelemetry), cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and enterprise-scale support delivery, pairing hands-on technical depth with a consultative approach that accelerates customer outcomes and retention.

What is he good at?
Training & Onboarding High Viz Migration Consultation Enterprise Escalation Management KCS Coach & Article Approver LLM Classification & Prompt Design AI Data-Handling Guardrails Observability & APM (Splunk, OpenTelemetry) Automation & Tooling Team Leadership & Mentoring Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) Root Cause Analysis Technical Account Collaboration Customer Success & Retention SaaS Environments Customer Advocacy
Professional Experience
Staff Technical Support Team Lead, Splunk Observability May 2023 – Jul 2026
Cisco (Splunk) · Remote — Minneapolis, MN
  • Led 10 engineers day to day: set priorities and owned the queue, ran onboarding for new hires, interviewed candidates and contributed to performance reviews.
  • Built a 7-day, video-led training program from scratch that became the standard ramp-up for our international teams.
  • Coached 25+ engineers across AMER, APAC and EMEA delivering Tier 2/3 support for Splunk Observability Cloud across 2,000+ enterprise accounts, sustaining 90%+ customer satisfaction.
  • Analyzed 7,627 cases across 23 months and found that over half of engineering escalations stemmed from avoidable root causes, rising from 50% to 69% over the window — the foundation for a prevention-first delivery model targeting the highest-volume failure patterns instead of resolving tickets one at a time.
  • Designed the prompt taxonomy and validation approach behind that analysis when manual review stopped scaling — hand-checked and script-checked samples, re-architected around memory and query limits — feeding a 5-tier case triage framework (exclude, fix, hand off, deflect, resolve) that showed leadership what support could fix and what needed other teams.
  • Built a redaction tool so customer tokens, passwords and other sensitive data never reached internal AI assistants — a guardrail the team used before putting case content through even secured models.
  • Designed, built and tested a cross-platform Layer 0–5 diagnostic framework that automates root-cause triage across ingestion, configuration and pipeline failures — built to standardize and accelerate fault isolation across the team.
  • Developed migration and onboarding playbooks to guide customers through complex platform cutovers — covering config source-of-truth verification and data ingestion to ensure a clean transition before cutover.
  • Served as senior technical escalation lead on enterprise accounts, working directly with customer engineering and operations teams — including senior technical stakeholders — to resolve high-stakes, time-critical production issues spanning APM tracing, log collection, OpenTelemetry instrumentation and cloud-streaming architectures.
  • Ran architectural and root-cause reviews with internal engineering leadership up to Director level, coordinating cross-functional response across support and engineering during critical incidents.
  • Partnered with Product and Engineering to translate recurring customer pain points into feature requests and bug prioritization, directly influencing roadmap decisions.
  • Mentored support engineers on technical depth and customer communication, developing several into senior-level roles; recognized company-wide as a "Disruptor of the Industry" (2024) for raising team standards and championing a customer-first culture.
  • Ran the team's KCS practice as coach and article approver across Splunk and Cisco — setting the quality bar for what got published and tying knowledge work to the deflection patterns the escalation analysis surfaced.
Senior Technical Support Engineer Oct 2019 – May 2023
Splunk (acquired by Cisco) · Remote — Minneapolis, MN
  • Owned end-to-end resolution of complex technical cases for enterprise customers across Splunk's Observability and APM product suite, consistently exceeding SLA targets.
  • Acted as a customer advocate internally, bridging communication between customers and product/engineering teams during critical incidents and feature gaps.
  • Developed technical documentation and runbooks that reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) for recurring issue categories.
  • Delivered technical enablement sessions on best practices for OpenTelemetry adoption, APM tracing configuration and cloud integration patterns.
Technical Support Engineer Apr 2017 – Oct 2019
SignalFx (acquired by Splunk) · Bloomington, MN
  • Provided frontline technical support for SignalFx's real-time monitoring and analytics platform, onboarding new enterprise customers and driving initial product adoption.
  • Troubleshot integrations across AWS, GCP and Azure environments, helping customers optimize their observability stack for performance and cost.
  • Contributed to internal knowledge base and customer-facing documentation, reducing repeat inquiries and improving self-service resolution rates.
Technical Support Engineer Jun 2012 – Apr 2017
EMC / Isilon (now Dell) · Plymouth, MN
  • Delivered expert-level support for Isilon OneFS clustered storage systems across a global enterprise customer base, handling complex filesystem, networking and performance issues.
  • Worked the overnight 3rd-shift support rotation for about a year (~2014), covering enterprise customer cases during US off-hours.
  • Earned 4 Bronze, 1 Silver and 1 Gold award for exceptional customer support performance and converting skeptical customers into long-term advocates.
  • Collaborated with pre- and post-development engineering teams to reproduce and resolve customer-reported defects in test environments.
  • Mentored junior engineers on advanced troubleshooting methodologies including packet-capture analysis and SMB permission resolution.
Helpdesk Specialist / Backup Specialist Oct 2010 – Apr 2012
Corporate Technologies, LLC · Eden Prairie, MN
  • Provided managed IT services for 700+ SMB clients, resolving 15+ tickets daily across Active Directory, Exchange, backup and endpoint security platforms.
  • Served as backup infrastructure specialist, auditing and recommending solutions to ensure data protection and disaster-recovery readiness.
  • Coordinated on-site escalations and third-party vendor support to meet client SLAs.
Technical Skills
Observability Splunk Observability Cloud (APM, IM, Log Observer, Synthetics, On-Call), OpenTelemetry (instrumentation, collectors, OTLP), distributed tracing, real-time analytics
Cloud & Infra AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, SaaS platforms, VMware
Data & Integration REST APIs, ingestion pipelines, query optimization, cross-system data joins (CRM/Jira/eng backlogs)
Applied AI LLM classification and prompt design, sensitive-data redaction for AI, Atlassian Rovo, AI-assisted scripting for analysis and dashboards (Python, JavaScript, Bash, PowerShell, HTML/CSS)
Tools Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Jira, Confluence, Wireshark, Linux
Education
B.A.S., Computer Forensic Science May 2010
Metropolitan State University · St. Paul, MN