The technical depth came first. Everything else was built on top of it.
Most product marketers in enterprise security learned the technology from vendor briefings, analyst reports, and slide decks. I learned it by running infrastructure. By the time I was writing positioning documents, I had already built AWS environments from scratch in 2012, managed redundant SAN deployments at scale with full backup strategy, run global Citrix operations at JPMorgan Chase, and spent years as a field SE showing enterprise security teams what their actual risk exposure looked like. That history is not behind the marketing work. It runs through it.
Credibility with a technical executive doesn't come from reading reports. It comes from having worked in the environments the marketing is supposed to speak to.
An early chapter that shaped everything: Zimmerman Advertising, part of Omnicom, in Fort Lauderdale. Level II support across 600-plus workstations in a mixed Windows and Mac environment, 24-hour executive support, Citrix XenApp, VMware/vSphere, FreePBX VoIP, mobile device management across iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, and SOX compliance. Three hundred-plus system deployments in two years. Full-stack IT generalist work before that term existed for it.
I moved to Level III within a year, supervising five engineers and serving as the escalation point for anything above helpdesk scope. Then into an infrastructure role: built out an AWS environment from scratch in early 2012, led a VMware physical-to-virtual migration from Windows Server 2003 hosts to 2008 R2, managed IBM DS4800 SANs at scale with redundant architecture and backup coverage, and ran SOX compliance audits end to end. Cloud infrastructure work in 2012, before it was the standard assumption.
I joined Citrix in 2012 as a Senior Technical Specialist and Virtual Lab Specialist. Three years in virtualized application and desktop delivery at enterprise scale, learning how it works in practice rather than in documentation. The networking dependencies. The profile management edge cases. The printing issues that always found their way into production. I earned the expert-level Citrix certifications during this period, and more importantly, I developed a working model of how complex enterprise environments actually behave under real conditions.
From Citrix, I moved to JPMorgan Chase as a Global Citrix Operations Architect. A different scale entirely. One of the most security-conscious, compliance-heavy organizations in the world, where security posture is not a policy document but infrastructure baked into every layer of the stack. Operating inside that environment changes how you think about what enterprise security actually requires, and what it takes to build and maintain it at scale. I saw enterprise technology at a scope most people only read about.
My first SE role was at RES Software, focused on workspace automation and IT service delivery. Moving from an internal architect role into a field-facing SE position changed how I thought about communicating technology. The technical fluency was the same. The audience, the stakes, and the need for clarity under pressure were different. That transition is where I started developing the instinct for translating deep technical knowledge into language that makes a buyer act.
Varonis was where data security became the lens. As a Sales Engineer, I was in front of enterprise security teams running assessments that showed them what their data exposure actually looked like. It was almost always worse than they expected. That experience, watching buyers encounter real evidence of risk they had not quantified before, shaped how I think about effective security messaging. The most powerful demos are not about product features. They are about making a real problem undeniable.
The SE arc continued through Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks, with PMM roles woven in. That full arc is covered in the SASE and Product Marketing pages. The point of this one is the foundation: twenty years of hands-on technical work in demanding enterprise environments that informs everything that comes after it.
Looking for someone who knows the technology from the inside and can build the narrative around it.