I have spent the last 8 years managing the technical relationship with customers pre- and post-sales, as well as managing teams of pre- and post-sales product experts. In these roles, I strive to understand a customer from a technical and organizational perspective, to answer the questions they do not yet know to ask, and be the point person for technological solutions to human problems.
As a manager, my goals are to document process and procedure to provide metrics of my team's creativity, problem-solving, and innovation, to drive transparent internal and external communications, to highlight brilliance, and to be a reliable escalation point for technical and relationship challenges.
My background is based on 9 years of experience as a Sr. Linux System Administrator and leader of System Administrator teams in managed services (IaaS, PaaS, traditional webhosting) as well as architecting single-tenant systems. I specialize in containers and orchestration, with a particular area of interest in solution selling, process mapping, application architecture, and XY-Problem-avoiding.
I've worked on the infrastructure of hundreds of companies, from break-fix troubleshooting to ground-up design and implementation, but my favorite part of working in this field is the speed of knowledge gain, and effective transfer of that knowledge.
At Bitwarden, I am the manager of the Integration Engineering group in the Customer Success department. I lead our international team of pre- and post-sales product experts, and collaboratively craft departmental policies, procedures, and training, scope internal projects around reference implementations, architecture, and public-facing content, as well as acting as a technical and relationship escalation point. The team is all-remote, spans 6 time-zones, and is growing rapidly - please contact me if you are interested in joining us!
I was in the Customer Success department as an Integration Engineer and later as the Team Lead. My role assisted both prospective and current customers throughout their password manager implementation journey, from deploying the Bitwarden solution on a variety of currently- and in-development supported deployment targets, best-practices on data importation and exportation, backups, integration with IdPs for SSO and SCIM, workflows, and other best-practices.
As a member of the Customer Success team, I also served as an escalation point for support issues for all customer types, worked cross-functionally with Engineering, Marketing, and especially assisted with roadmap planning and prioritization with Product to provide a valuable voice of customer feedback as we actively grew and developed the Bitwarden solution.
Additionally, as a subject-matter expert, I assisted the Community and Marketing teams with running public demos, workshops, livestreams on Twitch as part of the Bitwarden Brilliance public technical deep-dives, and ran sessions to provide in-depth walkthroughs of complex cloud- and self-hosted deployment, scaling, and integration topics to promote and demonstrate the Bitwarden feature-set for both paying customers and our open-source community.
At Balena (previously known as resin.io), I wore three hats: Solutions Engineer, Sales Executive, and Customer Success. This structure allowed me to work with customers through their entire lifecycle, from free trial through to full production, scaling a growing fleet of IoT devices managed by our SaaS and/or on-premises fleet management solutions.
I ran discovery calls with customers, including platform demonstrations, objection handling, hardware/device recommendations, and platform best-practices during the evaluation phase. Once a decision to move forward with a commercial engagement is made, I then owed the negotiations, contracting, and onboarding process with new customers. I continued working with these customers by providing assistance with integrations/automations as well as support triage.
As part of a highly collaborative team - not only in the Customer Success & Solutions Architecture team, but cross-team with software engineers, data scientists, and hardware-hackers-in-residence - I participated in knowledge-sharing about customer use-cases, brainstorming on bugfixes and feature development plans, pricing, marketing, hardware development and distribution, and future product and service development.
At Red Hat, I was on a team of Technical Account Managers, and focused specifically on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. My daily duties included being a single named resource for a small list of named accounts, performing ticket triage, ensuring correct support, project management, and development resources are aligned within Red Hat to solve customer problems; proactive support, including tracking and notifying of available security updates, roadmap presentations for insights into Red Hat's product planning lifecycle, and new software products that align with customer's business needs on their timelines; as well as working on behalf of the customer with external vendors to resolve technical issues.
Red Hat purchased CoreOS in March of 2018, and I transitioned from my previous pre-sales role into a post-sales role, similar but at the same time expanded in scope and more focused on a specific technology (Kubernetes and OpenShift) than my previous Enterprise Support Engineer role at Rackspace.
At CoreOS, I was on the team of Solutions Engineers, a pre-sales group responsible for discovery, walkthrough, POC deployment, and thought leadership around CoreOS' enterprise solutions for Kubernetes. CoreOS' product line included Tectonic, an enterprise distribution of pure-upstream Kubernetes deployed in an opinionated way to bring containers to large organizations, whether in the cloud or on-premises.
My day-to-day at CoreOS involved deploying Tectonic and Quay onto bare-metal hardware, VMs, as well as in AWS, and helping prospective customers with their proof-of-concept deployments during the sales cycle in order to make a buy decision on moving forward with the CoreOS product suite in production. I lead workshops and tech talks, both in-person and via webinars, explaining best-practices, reference architecture, or core concepts. I worked with customers to develop CI/CD workflows, monitoring solutions, and integrate RBAC for authentication and authorization within the cluster.
At Rackspace, I was an "ESE" on the Americas team working on a footprint of assigned accounts. My role involved everything from high-level architecture discussions with customers who have new or existing footprints at Rackspace to technical deep-dive troubleshooting and maintenance. My day-to-day work ranged from projects for technical refreshes of customer devices, including onboarding new products and services at the customer's discretion, to providing advice on, and ultimately implementing, new or improved technologies into the customer environment. I possess a deep knowledge of the Rackspace products and services, but also a deep understanding of the technologies and processes that underlie them, to ensure that exactly the right resources and products are deployed to meet customers' needs.
My previous role at Rackspace was Linux System Administrator in the Enterprise team working on large-footprint accounts. Major technologies for most clients are the LAMP and LEMP stacks, RHCS (RedHat Cluster Services), and escalated/deep-dive systems and kernel troubleshooting and optimization. I also work on, as they relate to the operating system, technologies including SAN, F5 load balancers, ASAs, etc. Clients also have VMware private clouds, as well as footprints in the Rackspace public cloud, including cloud servers, cloud load balancers, and CDN.
My role at Channel Clarity was one of a one-man-IT-shop. I was responsible for two cabinets of servers each in two separate data center facilities; the second of which I spun up and performed the migration to, including configuring redundant Cisco switches, centralized NFS storage, and redundant Cisco ASA firewalls with IPSEC and site-to-site VPN tunnels. I also performed a virtual-to-virtual migration from mixed OpenVZ and VMware ESXi environments to a centralized oVirt virtualization cluster. I maintained an infrastructure of MongoDB, mySQL, Apache, nginx, RabbitMQ, Amazon EC2 and RedShift, and BIND clustered environments. I was also responsible for office IT in a 50-person call center and a 15-person office.
I was promoted to manage the Systems Administration department at SingleHop and took on additional responsibilities while maintaining day-to-day ticket work as a Senior System Administrator. These tasks included employee scheduling, managing time off requests, delegation of project-work, ticket queue handling and SLA compliance throughout the organization, and organizing biweekly staff meetings. I established, documented, and enforced departmental policies, as well as designing and maintaining organization structure and responsibilities matrices. I was responsible for requisitioning new hires, including reviewing inbound resumes and performing interviews. I also ran yearly employee evaluations per company policies. I was the escalation point for inbound and outbound network abuse issues that impacted the Support department, as well as being 24x7 on-call for technical or client satisfaction escalations.
I took on additional responsibilities at SingleHop when I moved into a dual role of Senior System Administrator and Team Lead. The additional responsibilities included handling VIP clients and ensuring 10-minute response times via the ticketing system to meet our SLAs, taking on more complex project-based work including multi-server architectures and advanced technologies such as Microsoft stacks including Exchange, DFS, Active Directory, Microsoft as well as mySQL server replication, and other technologies such as SAN. I additionally took on the role of Team Lead, where I took responsibility for ensuring documentation of common processes, developing automation scripts, managing delegation of and taking on project work like VMware vCenter private cloud setups, and training.
At SingleHop, I was part of a team of system administrators providing expert technical support and managed system administration services to a client base of dedicated server and VPS/cloud clients. Tasks included managing the ticket and phone queues, where requests would run the gamut from troubleshooting out-of-control resource usage, mitigating rootkit or other intrusions, installing software, performance tuning middleware, advising on necessary upgrade paths for better hardware solutions, setting up distributed computing from load balancing to virtualization, managing server migrations, and server monitoring.
I returned to TouchSupport after a leave of absence to take some college courses, where I was promoted from my Level 2 position to Shift Manager. As the Shift Manager of the evening shift, I was still responsible for my previous tasks as a Level 2, but took on some additional responsibilities. These included generating employee test questions and evaluation procedures for quarterly employee reviews, documenting and filing procedures on steps to resolve common issues, and managing the work load for the Level 1 team to ensure focus and productivity.
At TouchSupport, I was part of a team responsible for responding to support tickets from over 300 website hosting and technical services companies via helpdesk system, telephone, and live chat support. I provided support for Linux, Unix, and Windows-based web and application servers at a client and administrator level. In addition to troubleshooting shared, semi-dedicated, and dedicated hosting environments, I was responsible for coordinating server backup restore efforts and crash restores, managing server migrations, and monitoring server health and uptime. As a member of the Level 2 team, I was also responsible for receiving escalations from and supervising the Level 1 technicians in above tasks, as well as ensuring a smooth hand-off during shift changes, as we were a 24x7x365 shop.
I co-founded a start-up providing virtualization and bare metal hardware consulting services, officially formalized as a company in March 2014. At my company, I maintained a lab setup (pending development and production use) of Puppet, managed a vCenter cluster, deployed server monitoring and backups, performed physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual migrations, and wrote automation and feature scripts in Bash and PowerShell. Additionally, I have handled support tickets for end-users of an open-source Joomla and OpenVZ-based "hub" system that provides web-based virtual machines for engineers to perform software simulations for composites design and manufacturing. I also performed the installation, migration to more powerful hardware, and provide ongoing troubleshooting while my clients' development team extends the software platform and migrates from OpenVZ to VMware, including consulting on and testing the VMware vCenter API. The start-up was retired after our client received a contract that required them to use in-house resources for a new project, and time constraints prevented further expansion on our end.
I live and breathe remote work in Vancouver, BC, and have been working remotely since 2014 in several US cities. Remote work suits my desire to concentrate in a quiet space while still utilizing collaboration and communication tools to keep in sync with my team.
Self-hosting has increasingly turned from a hobby to a necessity, as popular vendor-locked-in consumer solutions continue to retreat into business models that require both unfettered access to my personal information as well as monthly fees. To maintain my privacy, as well as to simply stop the endless cycle of being unceremoniously bounced from a familiar workflow to scramble to a new solution, I have come to enjoy the optimization of setting up services like NextCloud, Navidrome, and Mattermost.
When I'm not on the computer, I'm usually cooking, on a road trip, or wandering through the woods taking photographs with my dog.
I have been writing some personal and technical posts over on a blog lately, and for a less-wordy experience, try my photography page for an Instagramish photo stream.
This website is linked to my identity at Keybase.
You can find me on Github for the few work-related tasks that make it into a repo, although I use it mainly for issue reporting on open source projects I use. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
To reach out to me directly, try the e-mail address me at this domain name.
Copyright © 2015-2023 Jordan Cooks.