Resume of Michael Guldan

Contact: michael (at) guldan (dot) net

Customer-focused technical leader with 15+ years solving complex systems problems at scale. I partner with customers to diagnose root causes, architect sustainable solutions, and align technical strategies with business goals. Experienced in translating customer needs into product impact and guiding accounts through high-stakes deployments and performance optimization. Comfortable operating across support, solutions architecture, and consulting engagements in both startup and enterprise environments.

Work Experience

SECPOD 2025-08 to PRESENT

Customer Success Engineer

• Drove post-sales success on the SecPod Security SaaS platform for 40 accounts across the US, Canada and the UK, ranging from 100 endpoint SMBs to 3000+ endpoint enterprise clients by delivering post-sales integration support, integrating new environments, training customers, and resolving production issues.
• Translated customer feedback into product impact. Identified customer product friction points during customer meetings and support case audits, turning findings into technical product requests and partnered with engineering to implement two major features and several minor features to improve the customer experience.
• Identified and took ownership of at risk accounts in coordination with sales and support, addressing root causes through product fixes and internal process changes to reduce churn risk.
• Accelerated resolution of complex customer issues through hands on intervention. Reproduced and diagnosed persistent technical issues in test environments to accelerate engineering progress and resolution of long-running customer cases.
• Architected successful customer environments. Advised accounts on product use, API integration, scaling architecture, and disaster recovery planning for new and existing enterprise and reseller accounts supporting up to 3000 end users.
• Built custom tooling to extend impact, including an outreach tool (templated email automation and contact database) enabling more personalized outreach to my customers, and log handling tools for more quickly understanding customer issues.

AEROSPIKE INC. 2022-07 to 2024-12

Senior Technical Support Engineer

• Consistently resolved complex latency issues in high speed, low latency Aerospike database clusters often operating with sub-50ms read response requirements with possible issues such as incorrect or inconsistent configuration, storage or network latency, Linux kernel misconfiguration, data imbalance, and hardware failures. Applied deep systems knowledge to drive sustainable performance improvements over temporary fixes.
• Managed 2-3 escalations monthly while carrying a caseload of 15-25 concurrent support cases for enterprise customers across a wide range of industry sectors including Finance, Telecommunications, Government, Advertising and Retail customers, balancing more urgent production issues with long-term customer success and demonstrating judgment on prioritization and severity assessment.
• Applied standard Linux diagnostic tools (e.g. kernel profilers, strace, ntop, iostat, iperf3) to identify system, storage and network bottlenecks, using profiling data and other findings to inform performance optimization recommendations.
• Collaborated across the organization to escalate complex technical issues to engineering, through comprehensive documentation in JIRA tickets, incorporating environmental specifications, diagnostic findings, reproduction steps, and deep analysis of the issue to drive resolution.
• Guided customers through Aerospike Kubernetes Operator deployment, lifecycle management, and production troubleshooting including operator upgrades, persistent volume configuration, multi-zone configurations and scaling using AWS and GCE cloud environments.
• Published over 30 internal and external articles including knowledge base articles, several troubleshooting tutorials and a full glossary of Aerospike database key terms and concepts that is still available online.

FOSSA 2019-08 to 2020-12

Support Engineer

• Supported SaaS and on-premise customers of the Fossa compliance suite including integration of the FOSSA CLI software supply chain scanning tool into customer CI/CD pipeline.
• Built observability infrastructure for faster detection and resolution of SaaS customer issues. Designed and maintained Grafana dashboards for faster identification and resolution of SaaS customer issues, and improved understanding of customer engagement.
• Created tool to track customer issue fixes and feature requests through git, tie them to Jira tickets, and extract summaries to generate release notes.
• Tracked application errors in logs through the codebase to discover, document, and report errors.
• Created tools to query our API to demonstrate product issues for engineering and test for regression.
• Educated customers on how to interpret the licence compliance and security reports and how to resolve issues within the SaaS application.
• Owned proactive account maintenance. Led a cadence of weekly customer calls on key accounts monitoring open issues and environment health involving Sales, Product and Engineering as needed.
• Provided infrastructure expertise. Managed the install and administration lifecycle of customer on-premise Fossa instances hosted in Docker and Kubernetes, supporting customer through deplyment, configuration and operational troubleshooting.

Rubrik 2015-12 to 2019-03

Sr. Technical Support Engineer

• Diagnosed and resolved production issues on the Rubrik backup appliance spanning cluster availability, backup/recovery failures, replication and upgrades. Navigated root causes through network, configuration, operating system and application layers.
• Built Python based observability tool using REST APIs and data stored in Salesforce, ElasticSearch and Graphite to combine inventory data and current telemetry, enabling support, product operations and sales teams to make fast, informed decisions about customer health, adoption, and deployment.
• Tracked open cases with weekly customer calls for key accounts driving cases to resolution and assisting with account expansion.
• Triaged and debugged software and hardware issues on clustered Cassandra clusters.
• Resolving automation failures around (Ansible based) product upgrade.
• Traced errors through source code to find issue causes
• Assisted with configuration of access management and security groups for customer cloud environments.

Independent 2015-01 to 2015-11

Storage and Data Protection Consultant

• Led solution design and scoping for enterprise data protection projects
• Expanded from previous consultant roles to include project scoping and delivery planning
• Migrated Golang ZeroMQ code examples between libraries.
• Conducted implementation of backup software and hardware in environments with 250+ servers and across multiple data centers.

EMC Corp. 2011-04 to 2014-10

Solutions Architect

• Staff consultant working on longer term projects for enterprise customers.
• Implemented backup reporting system and failure handling procedure to reduce overall backup failures from 30+ failures a night to a few failures a week for over 2000 clients.
• Managed and trained junior to mid-level backup administrators on day to day administrative tasks and basic troubleshooting within large backup systems.
• Scripted testing and documented PoC data protection solution across multiple applications for large consumer bank.
• Day to day administration of multi-petabyte backup environment across multiple data centers including troubleshooting and automation of tasks through scripting.

Other experience prior to 2011

Storage, Network and Systems Consultancy

• Storage and backup expertise: Planned and implemented multi-petabyte backup strategies and storage systems for enterprise environments ranging from hundreds of terabytes to multi-datacenter deployments; directed resolution of high-profile production incidents for commercial backup products.
• Infrastructure advisory: Advised CIOs and IT managers on network equipment, server architecture, and systems purchasing; redesigned network infrastructure for efficiency and security; managed emergency incident response (e.g., upstream ISP migration with zero downtime).
• Team leadership and domain depth: Directed other consultants and staff through implementation, training, and troubleshooting; assessed organizational storage and systems capability to inform long-term planning; documented and standardized deployed environments.

SKILLS

Software: Aerospike, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Grafana, Wireshark/Tcpdump, iperf3

Infrastructure: AWS, GCE, Docker/Rocket, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Vmware, Proxmox

Observability/Tools: Grafana, Prometheus, ElasticSearch, JIRA, Salesforce

Languages: Python, Bash/shell, SQL, AWK