Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area
I am a seasoned customer support and success executive with 18+ years of experience leading enterprise support organizations at Cerebras, Databricks, Cloudera, and Hortonworks. My focus is on building scalable, high-performing global support teams and solving complex technical challenges across big data, cloud, and AI ecosystems. At Cerebras, I am currently heads down building and leading the Customer Success & Support organization. I'm passionate about: - Operational excellence in support strategy and escalation management - Leveraging AI to scale support with precision and speed - Cross-functional partnerships with Engineering and Product to drive supportability - Developing the next generation of support leaders I believe world-class support & success organizations drive not just customer retention but product innovation. I’m always open to connecting with customer-centric builders, support ops leaders, and product-focused engineering teams.
Current Focus -> Backline Support Engineering (aka Product Specialists/SMEs/L4 Support Team) -> Support Operations: Overseeing all Support systems required to keep support functioning -> Center of Excellence: Leading a team to build out the best practices for Global Support -> Knowledge Management: I lead the KB team responsible for regular knowledge updates -> Training & Enablement: Ensuring timely learning and development for the Global Support Team -> Started out as the Director (December 2019 - August 2022) and now the Sr. Director (August 2022 - Present) -> Led an organization of 50+ technical engineers, reporting directly to the SVP of Support. -> Built the Backline Engineering Support Team from scratch, growing to 20 engineers globally. -> Deflected 30% of escalations that would otherwise flow to core engineering (R&D) teams. -> Developed internal tooling and automation team from 2 to 18 engineers (Full Stack and DevOps). -> Architected comprehensive Support Console for productive case handling -> Founded the Support Center of Excellence initiative within Databricks to identify best practices for Support. -> Led the Support Training and Enablement functions. Lead automation efforts, architecting several critical tools: -> Comprehensive Internal Engineering Escalation and Escalation Management tool -> Advanced LLM Support Bot for 800+ users (leveraging OpenAI/ChatGPT) -> LLM-based (OpenAI/ChatGPT) Knowledge Management (KB Creation) tool with customizable workflows -> Hands-on Labs for support engineer enablement -> Powerful log management solution for faster troubleshooting -> Visual tool for product architecture troubleshooting
- Hortonworks merged with Cloudera and now managing a larger Product Specialist Team (Backline/SME Team). - Total of 27 engineers (global team) roll up to me with one manager reporting to me. - Participated and collaborated on several key process and diagnostic tools decisions. - Architect and co-developer for the in-house context-aware troubleshooting guide platform. - Mentor for several technical run books for multiple components of the stack.
- Built the Product Specialists Team (Backline/SME Team) from scratch. - Started with 2 engineers and grew up to 17 engineers across the globe. - Invested time and guidance with the Front Line Team to foster the next set of Backline Engineers. Tooling & Automation Efforts: - Architect and developer for the hands on lab exercises platform (250+ users) - Architect and co-developer for the in-house cluster creation platform (250+ users) - Mentor for development of the in house Heap Analyzer Tool - Architect and mentor for the drag and drop job creation framework - Mentored the development efforts for the in house Thread Analysis Tool
- Mentored the East Coast Support team to become the most efficient team across the company. - Architect for critical technical training programs. - Managed 21 highly skilled engineers
- Interviewed, hired and mentored the initial members of the India Support Team. - Built a comprehensive technical on-boarding guide that became standard across the global org. - The first batch of engineers mentored, picked up their first case within 22 days of joining. - Onsite at Sydney and repeated the above to build out the Australia Support Team.
As a Product Support Specialist, I engage with customers on a daily basis understanding the issues they are facing with our product and provide Technical/Development support to see that they are resolved. I also work with them in understanding their new requirements for the product and translate them as form of detailed design documents to engineering to get them implemented as a customization within the product. Providing support for the Revenue Assurance product also provides me with the opportunity of working closely with the teams at our customer locations helping them build better configurations and utilize the full potential of the product.