Background
Where it started
My first computers were a Commodore 128, then a run of Amigas: 500, 2500, 4000. When I finally moved to Windows 95, it didn’t behave the way I expected: the same action didn’t reliably give the same result. The Amiga had. A friend pointed me to Red Hat 4.2 (this was before RHEL existed), and Linux gave me that repeatability and stability back. I bought Red Hat 5.0 next and never left. Linux has been my primary OS ever since.
Certifications: earned two ways
RHCE and CCNP came through Wells Fargo-funded bootcamps. The company had a budget for a set number of cert attempts and needed a safe bet: someone who’d walk out with a passing result. I was that candidate.
CISSP was different: no class, no bootcamp. I studied on my own from a book and hands-on experience. On exam day I went to the wrong test location and showed up an hour late. Most candidates don’t even finish CISSP in the allotted time, so the proctors almost didn’t let me sit for it. I talked my way in: if I failed, I’d just pay and retake it. I finished second out of roughly 25–30 candidates in the room. A number of people who’d been testing for an hour already noticed exactly when I walked in.
Note: RHCE, CCNP, and CISSP are not currently active/renewed. They reflect credentials earned and held during two decades of enterprise engineering work.
Experience
Wells Fargo (2001–2022 — 20-year FTE anniversary)
Two decades at Wells Fargo, starting as a network engineering contractor in 2001, converting to full-time in 2002, and rising to Senior Systems Engineering Lead over an enterprise messaging security platform by the end of my tenure.
- Network Engineer Lead (2001–2002): Shift Lead in the Network Control Center, overseeing a network of 20,000+ hubs, switches, and routers.
- Information Security Analyst (2002–2004): Senior firewall engineer responsible for DMZ and firewall infrastructure, Severity 1 incident resolution.
- Senior Systems Engineering Lead, Enterprise Messaging (2004–2022): Directed infrastructure for a large-scale enterprise messaging security platform: encrypted email gateways, anti-spam and threat protection systems, infrastructure monitoring, and DNS management, built to meet strict regulatory, security, and performance requirements.
Highlights: led a migration to a new enterprise email encryption platform that simplified compliance access to encrypted content; built anti-spam infrastructure that eliminated linear server growth tied to spam volume; led load-balanced mail infrastructure for enterprise-scale reliability.
Legal experience
Direct experience navigating federal litigation and legal document preparation, giving me a working understanding of how legal teams operate, not just an outsider’s guess at it.