I’ve spent 16 years helping enterprise teams get real value out of complex technical platforms — first in storage, then in observability. Most recently I led a global team at Cisco/Splunk where I coached 25+ engineers across three regions and served as the go-to advisor for 2,000+ enterprise accounts on Splunk Observability Cloud. My work sits at the intersection of deep technical troubleshooting (OpenTelemetry pipelines, APM tracing, multi-cloud architectures) and the human side: building customer trust, driving adoption, running health checks and making sure product teams hear what customers actually need. I’m at my best when I’m helping people — whether that’s a customer trying to get to production-grade observability or an engineer learning how to have better conversations with their accounts.
What I Do Well
Observability practice enablement Customer success & retention OpenTelemetry instrumentation Enterprise escalation management Success plans & business reviews Splunk Observability Cloud Global team coaching & mentoring Voice-of-customer advocacy Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) Customer onboarding & adoption
Experience
Staff Team Lead, Observability Technical Success2023 — 2026
Cisco (Splunk)
Remote — Minneapolis, MN
Trusted technical advisor for 2,000+ enterprise customers on Splunk Observability Cloud. Drove adoption across APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Observer and OpenTelemetry instrumentation — 90%+ satisfaction throughout.
Built a global enablement program from scratch: coached 25+ engineers across NA, APAC and EMEA on advanced troubleshooting, customer engagement and observability best practices. Several grew into senior and expert-level roles.
Ran regular health checks, success plans and strategic reviews with high-priority accounts. Caught adoption risks early and surfaced expansion opportunities before renewals came due.
The team’s voice-of-customer channel to Product and Engineering — turned recurring customer pain points into feature requests and bug escalations that moved the roadmap.
Built a support intelligence practice from scratch — cross-referenced CRM exports, Jira backlogs and engineering resolution data to quantify avoidable escalations, map documentation gaps and surface paid services work being absorbed by support. Delivered findings as executive-ready analysis with interactive dashboards.
Used AI/LLM tooling to classify thousands of escalation tickets at scale when manual review couldn’t keep up. Designed the prompt workflows, validated outputs by hand and with scripts to quantify and condense trends — then pivoted the approach mid-project when the first iteration hit memory and query limits.
Hands-on with the hard stuff: OpenTelemetry collector pipelines, APM tracing, data ingestion bottlenecks, query performance tuning and cloud-streaming architecture issues across multi-cloud environments.
Won a company-wide “Disruptor of the Industry” award in 2024 for raising team standards and pushing a customer-first culture.
Senior Technical Support Engineer2019 — 2023
Splunk (acquired by Cisco)
Remote — Minneapolis, MN
Owned the full technical relationship for enterprise accounts on Splunk’s Observability and APM suite. Consistently exceeded SLA targets while keeping customers moving toward deeper adoption post-onboarding.
Led enablement sessions with customers on OpenTelemetry adoption, APM tracing setup and cloud integration — helping them get from initial deployment to production-grade observability faster.
Bridged the gap between customers and product/engineering during critical incidents. Influenced resolution timelines and helped prioritize what got fixed next.
Wrote the documentation and runbooks that cut MTTR on our most common issue categories, making self-service actually work across the customer base.
Technical Support Engineer2017 — 2019
SignalFx (acquired by Splunk)
Bloomington, MN
Guided enterprise customers through onboarding on SignalFx’s real-time monitoring platform, from first integration to first-value milestones.
Troubleshot across AWS, GCP and Azure — helped customers get their observability stack right for both performance and cost.
Built out internal and customer-facing knowledge base content that reduced repeat inquiries and improved self-service rates.
Technical Support Engineer2012 — 2017
EMC/Isilon (now Dell)
Plymouth, MN
Expert-level support for Isilon OneFS clustered storage across a global customer base — filesystems, networking, performance, the works.
Earned six customer support awards (4 Bronze, 1 Silver, 1 Gold) for turning skeptical customers into advocates.
Partnered with engineering to reproduce and resolve customer-reported defects. Mentored junior engineers on packet analysis and advanced troubleshooting.
Helpdesk & Backup Specialist2010 — 2012
Corporate Technologies, LLC
Eden Prairie, MN
Managed IT services for 700+ SMB clients — 15+ tickets/day across AD, Exchange, backup and endpoint security.
Owned backup infrastructure audits and disaster recovery readiness assessments.
Data & IntegrationREST APIs, data ingestion pipelines, query optimization, backend database analysis, cross-system data joins (CRM/Jira/eng backlogs)
AI & AnalysisAI/LLM-augmented classification workflows, prompt engineering, interactive data visualization (HTML/JS/CSS), support intelligence frameworks
ToolsSalesforce Service Cloud, Jira, Confluence, Wireshark, Python, JavaScript, Linux