Accountable for the architecture, the budget, the team, and the outcome.
I came up through this work — first as an engineer, then as an architect, and for the past several years as the person accountable for all four.
Infrastructure Strategy · IT Operations · Enterprise Architecture · Financial Stewardship · Vendor Governance · Team Leadership
What I do
My work sits where architecture, operations, money, and people meet. In multi-site environments those four things are the same problem. A design that cannot be operated by the team you actually have is not a design. A modernization that cannot be paid for is a slide deck. I have spent enough time on all four sides to keep them from pulling apart.
Most of my career has been in retail and industrial environments, where a network outage does not generate a ticket — it stops registers, idles crews, and costs money by the hour. That shapes how I build. I favor designs that degrade gracefully, vendors who answer the phone, and documentation that lets somebody else fix it at two in the morning.
How I lead
- I put numbers on things. The fastest way to get an infrastructure budget taken seriously is to show what the current state actually costs. In one large retail environment that meant building real telecom expense visibility before proposing a single change — and the change paid for itself.
- I build teams that outlast the project. Standardized documentation, clear runbooks, and no single-point-of-failure engineers. In a 1,100-location retail network that cut onboarding from two weeks to five days and removed dependencies that had been quietly sitting on one person.
- I govern vendors instead of hoping. Most of the distributed environments I have run were delivered largely by managed service providers. Managed service work rises to the level of the metrics you hold it to, and falls to the level of the ones you do not.
- I stay steady when the org does not. Reorganizations, leadership changes, and restructurings are normal in long programs. The architecture has to survive them, which means the governance around it has to be written down and not resident in anyone’s head.
I wrote A Field Guide for Engineers Moving Into IT Leadership because becoming responsible for people, budgets, and outcomes asks for a different set of skills than being the strongest engineer in the room — and almost nobody hands you those skills on the way through.
Scale and responsibility
Organization
A 39-person delivery organization — seven on-site engineers and 32 offshore managed-service resources — supporting a retail footprint that grew from 300+ to 400+ stores across 17 states.
Budget
A $5.2M annual infrastructure and telecom budget across CAPEX and OPEX, with $1.02M of recurring annual cost removed from it without reducing service.
Program
Architectural direction on a three-year, $154M network modernization spanning more than 6,500 locations — holding technical governance through a leadership transition rather than owning the program itself.
Teams built
Three technical teams built from the ground up, totalling 19 direct reports, in an industrial services environment.
Career history
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2026
Principal Infrastructure Architect O’Reilly Auto Parts — contract
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2023 – 2026
Manager, Core Technologies — Network, Voice & Database Academy Sports + Outdoors — infrastructure and IT operations leadership across 400+ locations
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2022 – 2023
Team Lead, Network Operations Tailored Brands — 1,100+ locations
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2019 – 2022
Senior Network Engineer & Virtual CIO PennComp — client advisory across seven commercial accounts
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2018 – Present
Partner Doleman Enterprises — telecommunications brokerage; carrier partnerships, circuit delivery, and contract negotiation for commercial customers
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2012 – 2018
Senior Manager / Network Architect Brock Group — three technical teams, 19 direct reports
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2008 – 2012
Regional Network Manager Comfort Systems USA
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2006 – 2008
IT Department Manager Robertson & Anschutz
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1997 – 2006
Earlier roles Support and systems management, beginning with a State of Texas agency project in 1997
Capabilities
Leadership
Infrastructure and IT operations strategy, budget ownership across CAPEX and OPEX, team building and technical hiring, vendor and MSP governance, contract negotiation, SLA and KPI frameworks, business–IT alignment.
Architecture and engineering
Multi-site enterprise network design, SD-WAN, high-availability headend and core design, cloud and hybrid infrastructure, unified communications and UCaaS strategy, data center lifecycle and relocation, security architecture and network access control.
Platforms led at team level
F5 and Citrix ADC / NetScaler application delivery environments. I have been accountable for these platforms through the engineers and managed-service partners who run them, rather than as current hands-on engineering work.
Environments
National retail, oil and gas, industrial and environmental services, professional services. On-premise, cloud, and hybrid. Internal teams, managed service providers, and mixed delivery models.
Continuous learning
Infrastructure leadership means keeping current on what is arriving next, not only on what is already running. Recent coursework:
Introductory credentials, verifiable at Google Skills. Listed as evidence of continued learning, not as machine learning engineering experience.
Résumé
A conventional two-page résumé is available for applications and ATS submission.