About Me

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Intro

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My career path has led me through the vibrant world of SaaS, building and managing teams within companies such as Elastic and Aiven, with a focus on technical support. My strengths lie in inspiring and coaching high‐performing teams, nurturing talent, and driving operational excellence. I thrive in dynamic environments where my leadership can translate in to real-world positive change. I am now looking for my next challenge and seeking similar team leadership and management roles.

I am passionate about all areas of technology and my experience has allowed me to utilise my versatile skill‐set. I have written code to support people and customers, and guided teams to deliver critical projects, built scalable processes and procedures, mentored, coached and grown individual contributors. Along the way I have also presented at many well‐known open‐source conferences around the Asia‐Pacific region. I have run live, hands‐on technical workshops at these events. I have delivered product training to businesses and groups, both virtually and in‐person.

Career Experience

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Aiven

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Senior Manager of Support, APJ

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February 2022 — January 2023 (Remote)

• Provided guidance and knowledge from previous experience to senior leadership to both define and build the new support organisation processes and procedures.
• Established key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics for measuring the support operations for the business.
• Collaborated with Sales, SRE, Infosec and Marketing teams to increase presence and support for Aiven customers in APJ region.
• Responsible as the go-to point of escalation and contact for Support in APJ.
• Coached a team of 8 support engineers remotely distributed throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Elastic

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Senior Support Manager

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September 2018 — December 2021 (Remote)

• Advised on support policy and operations for the APAC/APJ region.
• Coordinated support projects and continually improved operations.
• Developed dashboards and analytics for the support organisation to measure
• efficiency and identify operational issues.
• Responsible as the escalation and contact point for Support in APJ.
• Advocated on behalf of customers to other functional areas in the APJ region.
• Strengthened the collaboration with other parts of the organisation to ensure customer success.
• Mentored a team of support engineers (up to 20, remotely distributed throughout the APJ region.
• Fostered a high engagement score (> 90% year-over-year on company pulse/engagement surveys (as measured by CultureAmp).

Principal Support Engineer

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February 2015 — September 2018 (Remote)

• Spearheaded support for the APAC/APJ region for Elastic. Second hire in Australia for Elastic.
• Developed and guided the policies, operations, tooling, and documentation for establishing the Elastic support organisation from a handful of engineers to over a hundred.
• Advised customers at various sizes and stages with the journey using Elastic products and solutions.
• Represented Elastic at various conferences and events in the region.
• Elastic Outstanding Contribution Award recipient for 2017. -Developed one of the first community “Beats”, Pingbeat.

National Computational Infrastructure

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HPC Systems Administrator

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July 2014 — February 2015

• Collaborated on maintenance and optimisation of Raijin, a 57,472 core, 3592 node supercomputer with a peak performance of around 1.2petaFLOPS.
• Introduced an Elastic cluster for log management, analysis and reporting on the Raijin supercomputer.

Australian Medical Association

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Systems Administrator

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July 2011 - March 2014

• Optimised a mixed Linux server, Windows workstation environment for staff.
• Consolidated and modernised services and infrastructure for changing needs of the organisation.
• Advised on technical requirements for planning and management decisions across all areas of IT (infrastructure procurement and upgrades, services installation and deployment, network management and structure) within the AMA.

Skills

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Education

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PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics

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The Australian National University.

• First Class Honours in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Bachelor of Information Technology and Bachelor of Applied Science (Physics)

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CQ University

• Golden Key International Honours Society Membership.
• Australian Institute of Physics (Queensland Branch) Prize.