J. CARLOS CASTRO

Greater Atlanta Area | 407-334-5460 | root@HireCarlos.co | https://HireCarlos.co | English / Spanish

Sales Engineering / Solutions Architecture - Network Observability, Security, AIOps & Digital Experience

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Customer-facing Solutions Architect and former Monitoring Architect with 30+ years of hands-on infrastructure, networking, observability, and technical consulting experience. Strong fit for a Sales Engineering role where complex enterprise prospects need a credible technical advisor who can discover business drivers, whiteboard architecture, run technical workshops, validate requirements, and translate telemetry, network, security, and performance data into operational outcomes. Deep background across Linux/UNIX, TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, CDN/edge delivery, security controls, enterprise monitoring, log analytics, synthetic monitoring, dashboards, automation, and customer enablement.

SALES ENGINEERING & OBSERVABILITY FIT

• Technical pre-sales and trusted-advisor experience: lead discovery, workshops, architecture reviews, migration planning, technical validation, documentation, and executive/customer-facing explanation of tradeoffs.

• Network and application observability depth: Splunk, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, SiteScope, BPM/VuGen, Tivoli, New Relic, Grafana, InfluxDB, synthetic URL monitoring, dashboards, event/alert rationalization, SLA instrumentation, and production/DR validation.

• Security-aware delivery background: Akamai edge security and delivery patterns including origin protection, Site Shield-style controls, CORS behavior, DNS/GTM, performance analytics, reliability, and operational runbooks.

• Protocol and systems credibility: decades of Linux/UNIX operations, TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, storage, network I/O, performance troubleshooting, automation, and large-scale service operations.

• Business outcome orientation: able to connect technical design to reliability, scalability, incident response, customer experience, operational efficiency, and reduced mean time to identify/resolve issues.

CORE TECHNOLOGIES

Observability / AIOps: Splunk, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, SiteScope, BPM/VuGen, Tivoli, New Relic, Grafana, InfluxDB, log analytics, synthetic monitoring, dashboards, alerting, telemetry strategy.  Networking / Security / Delivery: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, NNTP, IPv4, CDN/edge delivery, origin protection, performance monitoring, availability, CORS, Site Shield, SureRoute, GTM/DNS concepts.  Systems / Automation: Linux, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Solaris, BSD, Windows, Ansible, Bash, Shell, Perl, SQL/MySQL, virtual servers, x86/x64, SunSPARC, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES, INC. | Remote | November 2022 to Present

Professional Services Solutions Architect - Gaming, Media & Content Delivery

• Design and implement customized Akamai delivery and security solutions for high-profile enterprise customers, improving digital experience, scalability, reliability, and operational visibility.

• Partner with sales, product, engineering, and customer stakeholders through technical discovery, solution design, implementation planning, workshops, and post-deployment optimization.

• Support technical pre-sales motions by translating customer requirements and pain points into tailored delivery, security, traffic-management, and observability-oriented architectures.

• Use analytics and performance monitoring data to identify optimization opportunities, explain tradeoffs, and drive continuous improvement in content delivery and customer experience.

• Guide complex migrations from legacy platforms to Akamai services, balancing business continuity, security standards, integration requirements, and operational readiness.

• Create customer-facing documentation, runbooks, and technical explanations that help operations teams deploy, troubleshoot, and manage services with confidence.

BANK OF AMERICA / GENESIS-10 | Plano, TX | February 2020 to November 2022

Monitoring Architect

• Assessed monitoring needs for bank applications and recommended combinations of Splunk, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, SiteScope, Tivoli, and related tools to satisfy service-assurance and security requirements.

• Documented monitoring gaps across applications, servers, components, states, production, disaster recovery, QA, UAT, and development environments.

• Educated and influenced application teams on tool capabilities, dashboard use, alerting logic, monitoring patterns, and the adaptation of scripts into approved enterprise observability practices.

• Evaluated URL and synthetic monitoring requirements and determined appropriate implementation patterns for SiteScope versus BPM/VuGen.

• Worked with tool engineers and application owners to validate monitoring implementations and guide teams to the right dashboards, access groups, and operational workflows.

COX COMMUNICATIONS | Atlanta, GA | September 2005 to December 2018

Senior Systems Administrator / Technical Operations Lead

• Served as Technical Operations Lead for the Mosaic DevOps Platform, ensuring a 60-server Red Hat correlation production platform had the compute, storage, network, and monitoring resources needed to meet application SLAs.

• Instrumented real-time monitoring so client applications remained within SLAs and platform resource utilization stayed within defined thresholds.

• Installed and supported Splunk Forwarders, Indexers, Heavy Forwarders, and Search Heads in a 90-node Red Hat Enterprise Log Management environment; diagnosed message transport, resource, and TCP/IP issues.

• Modernized legacy monitoring by moving services toward HP SiteScope/BPM/BSM, Splunk, and New Relic, defining thresholds and severities for customer-facing data, voice, and video services.

• Built Grafana dashboards backed by InfluxDB to expose previously unmonitored system and network behaviors, improving troubleshooting speed and operational accuracy.

• Troubleshot Linux kernel, network, storage I/O, Big Data/Ambari, and application-stack performance issues; used Ansible to install, update, and standardize server configurations.

USENETSERVER / HIGHWINDS SOFTWARE, LLC | Winter Park, FL | June 2001 to September 2005

Professional Services Engineer

• Acted as the technical face of the company for software and service deployments, strengthening customer relationships through needs discovery, solution recommendations, troubleshooting, training, tuning, and maintenance.

• Led customer-site design sessions for scalable server software deployments, adapting architecture and training material for operations, management, and executive audiences.

• Built lower environments and load-simulation tools to validate software behavior before customer release and provide feedback to software developers based on field needs.

• Developed automated Jumpstart configurations for rapid operating-system and application deployment.

BCANDID / SOFTWARE.COM / OPENWAVE | Boulder, CO | October 1999 to June 2001

Senior Consultant

• Delivered Openwave server deployments at customer sites, developed architecture and deployment plans, documented custom configurations, and served as escalation point for support teams.

• Reviewed Statements of Work for technical fit and helped sales teams explain complex ISP software capabilities to Tier I providers.

NET CRUSADER, INC. | Various Locations | November 1996 to October 1999

President / Lead Consultant

• Won and managed consulting and managed-service engagements with customers including AT&T, MCI, Software.com, and Interactive Classifieds by examining services, troubleshooting issues, monitoring operations, and guiding improvements.

• Designed and tested an NNTP platform for AT&T Canada, including test plans, development procedures, operational documentation, and future expansion recommendations.

• Trained operations teams on provisioning, debugging, and service management; supported Internet server environments across UNIX, applications, and content systems.

MCI INTERNETMCI | Pentagon City, VA | July 1995 to March 1996

Head Systems Administrator

• Created and operated a news feeding service that fed more than 700 sites and became a leading NNTP feed service on the Internet.

• Developed a Pull Feed service to reduce bandwidth usage for smaller customers and advised customers on UNIX, DNS, mail, and news-server configuration.

GTE FEDERAL SYSTEMS DIVISION | Chantilly, VA | February 1994 to July 1995

Systems Administrator

• Integrated Auspex NFS file servers, Sun workstations and servers, Linux PCs, Windows PCs, and Macs for a software engineering environment; administered DNS, NIS, backups, security monitoring, and documentation.

EDUCATION, CERTIFICATIONS & COMMUNITY

Certification: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.  Languages: English and Spanish.  Community: Volunteer with local youth rowing and rowing competitions; youth soccer coach; Boy Scout fundraising supporter.