Twenty years,
one packet.
Follow the pulse down the wire. Each stop is a place the work changed shape.
- 2006
Software development intern, Cisco
I hated it. My manager noticed, told me about a college hire program called the Sales Associate Program, and said I should apply. I did. Finished my BS in Telecommunications Engineering at St. John’s the same year.
- 2006
Sales Associate Program, then New York
About 300 of us interviewed. Three got in. After graduating I was placed in New York City with the commercial and startup team, and I learned the job on Silicon Alley.
1 of 3from 300 interviews - 2010
CCIE #27189
Passed the lab. My first love: Route Switch.
27189CCIE - 2013
Insieme Networks
Joined as Member of Technical Staff to take Nexus 9000 and ACI from a startup inside Cisco to a shipping product.
- 2013
First Cisco Live talk
BRKDCN-2300, on resilient data center design and business continuity. I have been back on that stage most years since, plus NYC Networkers in between.
- 2016
A major 401(k) provider picks Cisco
A competitive, multi-technology win at one of the largest retirement plan providers in the country. My first proof that I could carry an architecture end to end inside a financial services account, against every vendor in the room.
- 2017
New York convention center
Led the network and security redesign for the whole campus, from the first whiteboard to cutover. The same wire carries the Auto Show one week and Comic Con the next.
- 2018
Senior Technical Leadership Development Program
Cisco’s STLDP, 2018 to 2019. A year on how technical decisions get made at the executive level, and how to make them land.
- 2019
Technical Lead, Application Security
An incubation: Cisco testing whether it belonged in application security. I was the tech lead, mostly on Secure Workload. Architecture, design, implementation, troubleshooting, and the documentation nobody else wanted to write.
- 2019
Azure Connector
Wrote the Terraform and PowerShell that let Secure Workload plug into Azure without a week of manual setup. Picked up the Azure Developer Associate cert along the way.
- 2021
The STEP Program
Built the training and labs that teach Cisco engineers cloud network security. It went global. New engineers went from 22 months to 6 before they were useful on a customer call.
22 → 6months to first customer call - 2023
Principal Engineer, AI & Infrastructure Security
I sit with CTOs and CISOs at global banks and help them decide, over a 3-to-5 year horizon, where AI, security and automation belong in their infrastructure. Then I own the architecture that gets them there.
- 2024
MBA, Business Analytics
Syracuse University. I wanted to argue the business case as well as I could argue the design.
- 2026
Cisco Live BRKDCN-2982 and Money Honey
Private cloud-style services on Nexus and Cilium at Cisco Live. Money Honey is my public research project on breaking embedded AI security. Twenty years in, still curious.
20 yrsone company, many jobs