• Highlights of Professional Achievements
  • As Senior Director, Cloud Systems Engineering, MICROSTRATEGY

    Direct architecture and deployment of complex cloud network platforms and mitigate any IT risk. Oversee daily workflow, morale, and career pathing of 3 teams comprised of managers and engineers developing, deploying, and maintaining cloud platforms as a service.

    • Retained large national client account through effective communication skills and relationship management expertise. Improved performance of client’s application and reporting services, resulting in substantial investment in MicroStrategy.
    • Deployed over 200 customer cloud environment deployments per quarter in 2020.
    • Developed and applied automated and centralized security controls to company’s 117 Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 27 Microsoft Azure accounts.
    • Collaborated with human resources, finance, and in-country resources to ensure new global employees could operate on a 24/7 on-call schedule, alleviating pressure on US-based support teams.
  • As Senior Platform Engineer, NETUITIVE

    Managed end-to-end product life cycle for innovative AI-based performance monitoring platform while simultaneously providing support for legacy systems.

    • Migrated ticketing system from legacy system to Zendesk, integrating with Atlassian and Jira to align support cases with engineering work and use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer feedback.
  • As Premium Support Lead, MICROSTRATEGY

    Led all technical customer support interactions and mentored 10 premium support engineers.

    • Created business continuity plan and yearly recertification testing to ensure consistent and effective client support by Premium Support Engineers.
    • Managed 24/7 emergency escalation operations and successfully resolved critical system outages for clients, including Target, Citibank, American Express, and Groupon.
  • Professional Experience
  • 2017-Present

    Senior Director, Cloud Systems Engineering at MICROSTRATEGY, INC.

    Tysons Corner, Virginia

    Recruit, hire, train, and manage multiple teams across 3 continents, including direct supervision of 5 managers. Lead design, deployment, and support of cloud platform as a service, managing all architecture updates, cloud migrations, and security protection. Collaborate with security and engineering teams to identify, isolate, and mitigate vulnerabilities using AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud products. Develop and implement platforms that allow clients to quickly deploy security changes across hundreds of machines. Represent company in discussions with auditors and ensure security compliance to achieve annual recertification for ISO27001/2, SOC2 Type II, and PCI-DSS. Create and deliver executive presentations, regularly distilling complex technical information into sales and finance language to educate leadership on practice, program, capability, and incident status.

    • Initiated and established standardized 24/7 alarm monitoring operation, developing alarm schemas and response protocols, and converting to scalable platform solutions to ensure immediate response times and avoid service outages. Reduced alarms from 14,000 per day to 2,000 per week.
    • Analyzed and unified deployment pipelines to standardize customer environment deployment, reducing build time from 2 weeks to 6 hours. Added automation capabilities and further reduced build time from 6 hours to 3 hours, enabling acceleration of large-capacity scalable initiatives and driving significant increases in productivity.
    • Increased employee satisfaction and retention by cultivating an open, positive learning culture.
    • Realized over $2M in cost savings through AWS enterprise discounts, restructure of reserved instance strategy, and optimization of data retention and deletion policies.
  • 2015-2017

    Senior Platform Support Engineer, Technical Account Manager at NETUITIVE

    Reston, Virginia

    Supported customer through end-to-end product life cycle, including initial introduction, onboarding, configuration, training, and technical support for AI-based capacity monitoring system in startup environment. Trained and mentored all new engineers in platform to ensure competency and effectiveness in customer interactions. Provided maintenance and technical support for legacy monitoring products. Consistently received 100% customer satisfaction scores for support and account management during 2-year tenure.

    • Acquired comprehensive functional understanding of development process and overall value of performance monitoring, monitoring systems, and integration of open-source platforms.
    • Provided sole maintenance and technical support for legacy monitoring products, single-handedly supporting and maintaining Verizon’s performance monitoring systems.
  • 2011-2015

    Premium Support Lead, at MICROSTRATEGY, INC.

    Tysons Corner, Virginia

    Joined team as front-line engineer; quickly promoted to Premium Support Lead. Managed all technical client account interactions, including case management, issue resolution, and on-site visits. Mentored and managed 10 engineers, providing daily technical and managerial expertise and escalation support for customer needs. Created and communicated ongoing project reporting for sales and customer stakeholders and developed and presented executive summaries. Provided on-site subject matter expertise to assess, mitigate, and rectify customer system issues, resolving incidents, allowing customers to move forward, and increasing confidence in MicroStrategy.

    • Established new pod-based customer ownership model still in operation today, reducing number of escalations to back-end support teams by 80% and improving customer experience.
    • Created concept and developed database and backend architecture for case management mobile app used by internal teams to review and discuss customer case resolution.
  • Volunteerism
  • 2018-2019

    President at Long Branch Creek Civic Association

    Long Branch Creek Civic Association is apart of the Arlington County and Arlington Civic Federation for community outreach and advocacy. The Civic Associations promote the general welfare of Arlington County and vicinity in a non-partisan, non-sectarian, non-sectional, and non-political manner.

    • Elected unanimously as President on January 2018, Treasurer in 2017
    • Laison with Arlington County offices for community outreach and advocacy
    • Lead quarterly Association meetings and invite County/State guest speakers
    • Created community events and advocacy including park cleanups and movie nights
  • 2016-2017

    Low-Income / NSA Representative at Arlington County Community Development Block Grant Citizens' Advisory Committee (CDCAC)

    The Community Development Citizens Advisory Committee (CDCAC) reviews grant requests, evaluates programs, and makes recommendations to the County Board for the use of federal Community Development Block Grant and Community Services Block Grant (CDBG) funds. The Committee also advises on the development of the annual Community Development program as part of Arlington’s five-year Consolidated Plan.

  • 2016-2019

    Greeter at Honor Flight DCA

    Volunteer to greet veterans as they arrive at Washington DCA. This organization provides free travel to elderly veterans to see the monuments built in their honor.

  • Member at Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Fraternity

  • Member at Phi Theta Kappa International Honors Society

  • Skills
  • Cloud Operations

    AWS EC2, EBS, EFS, RDS, EB Salt Github / Gitlab Kubernetes Python

  • Business Intelligence

    MicroStrategy Intelligence Server MicroStrategy API MicroStrategy Mobile MicroStrategy Web MicroStrategy Library MicroStrategy Hyper MicroStrategy Common Tools SQL

  • System Administration

    Windows Server CentOS Redhat / AWS Linux Ubuntu Active Directory SAML 2.0

  • Performance Monitoring

    Diamond CollectD CloudWatch StatsD Panopta

  • CRM

    Salesforce Zendesk Support Central BMC Remedy

  • Interests
  • Gaming

    Rocket League War Thunder Assassins Creed

  • Homebrewing

    Two-stage fermentation Kegging Forced Carbonation

  • References
  • Mark is a strong performer in CLD. He understands the technologies and personnel in CLD and is one of the best at dealing with customers in tough situations. Mark assisted with the new CLD BU creation and created in-depth processes to ensure the transition goes smoothly. His documentation was very detailed and very well thought out. Mark is seen as trusted leader on the floor and his customers trust his judgement.

    Roshan Popal, Senior Vice President and CISO, MicroStrategy
  • Mark did delivering the Cloud Power Up keynote in Warsaw last week. He is an excellent presenter, and was the absolute right person to help deliver the Cloud message. He resonated very well with our technical audience, and “spoke their language” perfectly!

    Christa Patton, Senior Director, Learning & Development, MicroStrategy
  • Mark was a very dedicated employee that strived on customer satisfaction and ascertaining knowledge of the system to be able to answer questions and offer suggestions to the best of his ability. Mark was a pleasure to work with and offered much to company morale.

    Zach McGonigal, Web Team Lead, LiveSafe
  • I had the great pleasure of working with Mark, and his commitment and work ethic is second to none. He always knew how to make the best outcome for difficult situations, and would always follow up diligently.

    Jason Ahn, Technical Lead, Datastrong
  • Mark is conscientious, diligent, thoughtful, detailed-oriented and professional. These personality traits allow him to maintain a perfect 100% customer satisfaction on every interaction with prospects and customers over two years running. His technical proficiency combined with polished customer relationship management skills, and flawless follow-through have made him a reliable resource for our users throughout the sales cycle starting from a first demo in the pre-sales stage, and continuing through their subscription and renewals. He always responds favorably to requests for help as he did when he took on the task of creating a technical training curriculum and use it to personally and patiently train our entire sales team. His work ethics, collaboration style and teamwork have earned him the respect of all of his colleagues including myself.

    Bob Farzami, CEO and Founder, Netuitive
  • Mark is a multi-dimensional Senior Platform Support Engineer who does an expert job of striking that rare balance between customer advocacy, and managing and shaping the customer’s expectations to align with the company’s priorities. He is both technically proficient and an excellent communicator. Mark led the successful replacement of our customer service support and ticketing platform as one of his first projects and Netuitive, significantly enhancing and modernizing our capabilities, while streamlining our processes. Last year Mark was tasked with adding Technical Account Manager to his title and workload, providing pre-sales engineering support to our sales team and customer prospects, a role he has taken on with full enthusiasm and much success. I would highly recommend Mark for any position that would allow him to apply his wide-array of talents.

    Hunter Louis, CFO, Netuitive
  • Mark has a passion and mature skill set to support customers. I have been managing Mark for the last two years at Netuitive. He always receives 100% satisfaction ratings from our customers and that is not an easy accomplishment. We have many customers with very complex environments and requirements. Our support team provides a high level engagement with these customers at more of a consulting level. Mark brings that right mix of technical skills and care for the customer’s success. He also does a great job coming up with creative and new ideas to help our customers. I would highly recommend Mark for any senior level support engineer role.

    Jason Simpson, Vice President, Netuitive
  • Mark and I worked together on the Support Team at Netuitive. He is an absolute pleasure to work with. He's knowledgable in many areas and always willing to put forth that expertise to solve the issues put in front of him. Team player all around!

    Ryan Clagett, Platform Support Engineer, Netuitive
  • I worked with Mark for about two years primarily in resolving customer issues that involved the performance of our anomaly detection algorithms. Mark was an excellent customer advocate and consistently make the effort to completely understand often very complex analytics so that he could either help me chase down a problem as well as ensure that the customer had all that was needed to resolve the issue. I would not hesitate to place my most important customers in Mark's capable hands.

    Elizabeth Nichols, Chief Data Scientist, Netuitive
  • Mark has been an excellent employee for us. He is punctual, reliable, works on an issue until it is resolved and is a pleasure to work with. His strengths include his ability to work well with others and empathize with users and their situations. He has also shown leadership qualities as a summer staff employee. I only wish all of my student employees were as good as Mark. I can only give him my highest recommendation.

    Joyce Landreth, Assistant Director, Virginia Tech
  • Thank you!
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