Samuel Jacob
Lawrenceville
Summary
Exceptionally well-qualified senior IT professional with sophisticated technical skills and a passion for resolving complex problems or business challenges through innovation. Adept at maintaining focus on achieving bottom-line results while formulating and implementing advanced technology and business solutions to meet a diversity of needs. Tenacious and intuitive problem-solver, "firefighter," and team leader averting issues prior to their impact on customers or operations. Effective working solo or as an active team participant or leader.
Overview
24
24
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
SENIOR PRINCIPAL ESCALATION ENGINEER
CITRIX Systems. Inc
Alpharetta
09.2024 - Current
- Global Technical Leader for a team of 250+ Escalation Engineers across the company in areas of technical growth, upward career mobility and mentorship.
- Conceptualize, Implement and Measure process improvements to better serve Citrix Support customers.
- Actively participate in hiring strategy and team building efforts to scale the workload and effectively utilize engineers.
- Drive tooling and workflow excellence by participating in projects that create exponential returns for Citrix support customers.
- Propose product enhancements based on critical field level issues seen on high stakes accounts.
- Promulgate and formulate support ticket volume deflection activities through automation and front of the funnel activities.
- Helped close sales deals worth at least $10 million every year, by resolving critical issues for large marquee accounts.
- Worked closely with engineering on trace-tooling and symbol alignment to cut down debugging hours by 40%.
- Formulated a comprehensive training plan across the GEOs for Escalation, which led to a 20% decrease in time to closure of tickets.
- Proactively Collaborated with engineering on perf tuning several structural SQL performance bugs which cut down support tickets in those areas by 80% over the years.
PRINCIPAL ESCALATION ENGINEER
Citrix Systems Inc
Alpharetta
05.2019 - 08.2024
- Lead efforts in a director-level, individual contributor capacity, directing the full lifecycle of Tier-3 operations from the technology side.
- Improve the product quality by debugging critical bugs during stress tests for performance and scalability during the product release.
- Incorporate AI-based solutions for augmenting the knowledge base, spreading bug finding, and improving accuracy for customer problems.
- Collaborate with cross-department stakeholders to resolve pervasive product issues that are critical to revenue operations.
LEAD ESCALATION ENGINEER
CITRIX Systems. Inc
Bangalore
02.2013 - 03.2019
- Debug and instrument source code to fix highly pervasive and critical customer issues.
- Work closely with Citrix Consulting teams to assist with complex POCs and other revenue-generating activities.
- Technical Lead for a team of 15 to 20 engineers, and responsible for technical growth and career path coaching.
- Prepare training content to upskill the Escalation team members.
- Train, mentor, and hire the L1 teams for supporting Citrix products.
SENIOR ESCALATION ENGINEER - VIRTUALIZATION
CITRIX INDIA Pvt. LTD
Bangalore
03.2011 - 02.2013
- Handle technical escalations and was responsible for critical problem resolution on Issues with high level of visibility up to Director level.
- Analyze code, memory dumps and instrumentation tracing to fix highly technical and complex issues.
- Filing bugs based on product issues and in house code analysis.
- Act as a mentor to Junior engineers in the team.
- Work with Fortune 500 customers on deployment and implementation related issues.
- Documenting known issues and observations based on cases.
SUPPORT ESCALATION ENGINEER - INFORMATION SECURITY
MICROSOFT INDIA Pvt. LTD
Bangalore
01.2008 - 12.2010
- Functioned as a technical Escalation point for product security issues and worked as a SME on Messaging, Collaboration and Client security.
- Drive projects to build tools and initiated projects to increase technical excellence in the cluster.
- Mentored junior engineers and led triage meetings to develop effective solutions.
- Key technical interface to Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) and Development for the resolution of high impact or pervasive issues effecting Microsoft corporate clients.
- Helped clients with Incident Response and forensics in trying to uncover malware outbreaks.
- Beta tested emerging products to provide valuable feedback to the product group.
- Filed Bugs, Design change requests (DCRs) and enhancements.
- Performed forensics on compromised servers and workstations to determine the security holes and methodology employed by the attacker.
SENIOR IT ANALYST
PHOTON INFOTECH PVT LTD
Chennai
02.2007 - 01.2008
- Product Specialist for Microsoft Exchange Server, ISA Server, MOM, SMS, IIS server, Windows 2000/2003 servers and clients.
- Handled 520 servers across the globe in 23 countries to provide top level uptime.
- Provided maintenance of 80 Active Directory Sites across the Globe.
- Performed maintenance of PIX firewalls in the central office in Boston and branch offices.
- Responsible for Maintenance and Deployment of GPOs and replication across 80 AD sites.
- Managed the 2 node Exchange Cluster as well as the front-end servers in the DMZ.
- Implemented and fine tuned DNS and Network Traffic.
- Implemented and troubleshot DHCP across all the 80 physical sites.
SENIOR TECH
Sutherland Global Services LTD
Chennai
05.2004 - 01.2007
- Led a team of fifteen engineers supporting Windows Issues for Microsoft customers, and handled Escalations on business down situations to prevent revenue loss and prolonged downtime.
- Participated in the entire hiring cycle to evaluate potential hires, and mentored junior engineers to bring upto service delivery readiness.
- Functioned as a trusted advisor to management on technical changes to be introduced in the project, to scale up the operations, and improve customer satisfaction.
- Designed training programs to improve operational efficiency by reducing the time to service delivery by 25%.
- Beta tested Microsoft releases to provide deep level feedback on bug fixes and became an early expert on newer versions.
- Improved public facing Microsoft knowledge base quality to promote customer self help.
IT ADMINISTRATOR AND MIXING ENGINEER
FIRST HARMONICS STUDIOS
Chennai
06.2002 - 03.2004
- Worked to maintain high availability of the IT Infrastructure.
- Configured Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and implemented a clean installation of it.
- Configured Exchange Server 2003 for 100 users on a single server to collaborate with a foreign recording studio.
- Configured IIS 6.0 and DHCP, DNS in the LAN.
- Maintained 70 clients and 9 servers including file and print servers.
- Maintained the computer based recording environment which included DAWs, Mastering Plug-ins etc.
Education
Bachelor of Commerce -
MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE
Chennai01.2008
Higher Secondary -
ZION MAT HR. SEC SCHOOL
Chennai01.1999
KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA NO 1
Tambaram01.1997
Skills
- Powershell
- C
- C
- C#
- Disassembly
- TCP/IP
- DNS
- DHCP
- IP Routing
- QOS
- STP
- SMB
- Windows Server - 200x
- Exchange Server
- SCCM
- SCOM
- IIS
- Windows Internals
- Device Drivers
- XenApp
- XenDesktop
- Active Directory
- Windbg
- OllyDbg
- IDA Pro
- KD
- NTSD
- MS SQL Server
- TSQL
- Performance Tuning
- AWS
- Azure
- Algorithms And Data Structures
- Docker
- Jenkins
- Kubernetes
- Splunk
- Wireshark
Certification
- MCSE
- MCSA
- MCSA-M
- MCP
- MCSE-M
- MCITP-EA
- MCITP-SA
- MCSA:Security
- MCSE:Security
- MCTS
Timeline
SENIOR PRINCIPAL ESCALATION ENGINEER
CITRIX Systems. Inc
09.2024 - Current
PRINCIPAL ESCALATION ENGINEER
Citrix Systems Inc
05.2019 - 08.2024
LEAD ESCALATION ENGINEER
CITRIX Systems. Inc
02.2013 - 03.2019
SENIOR ESCALATION ENGINEER - VIRTUALIZATION
CITRIX INDIA Pvt. LTD
03.2011 - 02.2013
SUPPORT ESCALATION ENGINEER - INFORMATION SECURITY
MICROSOFT INDIA Pvt. LTD
01.2008 - 12.2010
SENIOR IT ANALYST
PHOTON INFOTECH PVT LTD
02.2007 - 01.2008
SENIOR TECH
Sutherland Global Services LTD
05.2004 - 01.2007
IT ADMINISTRATOR AND MIXING ENGINEER
FIRST HARMONICS STUDIOS
06.2002 - 03.2004
Bachelor of Commerce -
MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE
Higher Secondary -
ZION MAT HR. SEC SCHOOL
KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA NO 1