Geoff Hellings

Enterprise SaaS provider serving airlines, defense forces, and rail organizations on a multi-tenant Azure platform. Recruited in-house by a former Rackspace strategic account after 4+ years as their Customer Success Engineer. Sole hands-on owner and subject-matter expert for the Azure, Akamai, and Mailgun platforms within a globally distributed team across the US, UK, Israel, and Australia.

• Managed the Microsoft relationship as primary attendee on two monthly cadences: account reviews with Microsoft’s Azure Customer Success Manager (renewals, billing, growth, escalations) and technical reviews with Azure engineering, such as scoping a SQL Managed Instance Next-gen upgrade for 2–4 TB databases by weighing IOPS gains against migration downtime
• Kept the legacy Azure platform reliable, secure, and compliant through the post-merger migration of customers to the company’s AWS-based application, and trained backup staff on platform procedures
• Served as Customer Success’s escalation point for the Mailgun email platform; moved CS from informal direct requests to ticket-based intake and trained the team on the new workflow
• Performed all builds and changes across the Azure platform (App Services, IIS and app pools, App Gateway, SQL Managed Instances, Redis, VPN Gateway, Storage) for multiple enterprise tenants and 10M+ monthly requests, including the Azure side of site-to-site VPN connectivity to AWS
• Directed disaster recovery across Azure North Central (production) and South Central (DR): quarterly file and SQL backup validation, a full regional failover test with DNS cutover and application validation, independent Azure DevOps and DNS backups against vendor outages, runbooks and DR procedures, and on-call incident response
• Led a zero-downtime observability migration from New Relic to Datadog (APM, dashboards, infrastructure metrics, alerting)
• Designed the post-merger unified observability platform and authored its tagging, logging, and naming policies, all approved for adoption, then supported the SRE team’s rollout across acquired entities
• Co-architected the Akamai WAF and CDN deployment and served as sole administrator, driving configuration reviews against OWASP Top 10 threats and pre-authorizing customer vulnerability scans so assessments ran without reputation-based blocks
• Served as sole escalation point for Alert Logic MDR agents and IDS across Azure, and as the company’s Alert Logic subject-matter expert supporting the security team’s rollout to AWS
• Maintained Azure and VM controls for ISO 27001, producing audit evidence and implementing controls (encryption at rest, password expiration, network ACLs); passed every audit (2022–2026) with zero required remediations
• Adopted AI-assisted operations early, integrating Claude via Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Azure, Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira, Confluence, and Microsoft 365, with credentials in 1Password and human review on every change
• Used AI-driven analysis of Datadog metrics, logs, and alerts to speed troubleshooting and root cause analysis, build dashboards, and add cost guardrails that flag runaway log ingestion; automated Jira and Confluence workflows and authored migration plans standardizing acquired companies

Trusted technical advisor and escalation owner for a book of business of 10+ Strategic Premium accounts, Salesforce’s top support tier, including major media and entertainment enterprises.

• Served as single point of technical accountability for Strategic Premium accounts, coordinating Product, Engineering, Support, and Sales, and logging customer feature requests and support feedback in Salesforce for product teams
• Managed critical escalations end-to-end, troubleshooting complex environment issues, coordinating cross-functional resolution teams, and keeping executive stakeholders informed to protect renewals
• Ran proactive QBRs identifying performance trends, deployment risks, and adoption gaps, turning insights into action plans that improved customer health, reduced churn risk, and surfaced expansion opportunities

Founding member of Forcepoint’s technical onboarding team within Customer Success, building processes from the ground up to deliver value to customers faster.

• Built repeatable onboarding processes, tooling, and documentation from the ground up for a newly formed function
• Built deployment success plans for new customers and partnered with Professional Services, TAMs, and Product Management to accelerate time-to-value
• Managed customer accounts in Salesforce and Gainsight

Technical advisor to customers on public and private cloud, working with support operations, account teams, and product teams to match solutions to customer requirements. Remote from March 2020; role concluded in COVID-19 office closures and staff reductions.

• Advised 20+ enterprise customers as technical advisor and solution architect on migrations from a closing data center to managed IaaS and public cloud, with minimal business disruption
• Restructured a colocation engagement into a managed IaaS solution, growing account MRR 5x while improving scalability and reducing customer operational overhead
• Produced architecture diagrams, migration runbooks, and technical specs supporting pre-sales and post-sales delivery
• Developed new solutions using Veeam for P2V offsite backup and recovery
• Trained Account Executives and non-technical sales roles on products and customer solutions

Technical account management role: senior technical and relationship owner for 16–20 Enterprise accounts ($650K MRR) and 4 Strategic accounts ($1M+ MRR) spanning dedicated, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure across a 79,000+ server fleet.

• Converted every account from passive/detractor Net Promoter Score (NPS) to Promoter and secured long-term renewals through technical advocacy and proactive relationship management
• Grew MRR 20%+ year over year for multiple consecutive years and delivered executive QBRs aligning infrastructure roadmaps to business objectives
• Built success plans around customer-defined outcomes such as cloud migrations, new SQL cluster deployments, and faster ticket response and handling
• Updated account management, device management, and ticket-handling guidelines, including technical and billing escalation paths, and relayed customer feature requests and support feedback to product teams
• Guided customers through cloud adoption and hybrid strategies spanning dedicated, cloud (Azure, AWS), and colocation environments, partnering with Rackspace’s AWS and Azure specialist teams on implementation
• Troubleshot and resolved complex issues across Windows, IIS, SQL Server, DNS, SMTP, Active Directory, MSCS, and SAN/NAS/DAS storage
• Covered two full account bases for a quarter while maintaining SLA adherence and customer satisfaction
• Mentored junior administrators into senior engineers and built internal knowledge-sharing programs

Deployed, supported, and maintained servers and infrastructure for customers ranging from medium-sized businesses to global enterprise operations hosted at Rackspace data centers worldwide. Provided support to critical systems configured for optimal uptime using high availability and disaster recovery technologies on both software and hardware levels. Worked independently or collaboratively to resolve alerts and customer tickets while communicating technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Worked daily with Windows Server 2003/2008/2012, AD, DNS, DHCP, IIS, WSFC, RDS, SQL, and DFS
• Nominated for companywide Fanatical Jacket Award
• Chosen to train and mentor new team members on technical and procedural needs
• Assigned projects requiring ownership to completion and collaboration across many teams

Led customer onboarding and equipment deployment coordination, working with the team to develop the new master ticket process that became standard policy for all deployments company-wide. Gathered client requirements, ensured deployments met their needs, and resolved questions and issues throughout the deployment lifecycle.

• Developed new master ticket process adopted as standard policy company-wide
• Coordinated with all departments to meet timelines and ensure information flow
• Able to work many implementation roles and cover for team members as needed

Led datacenter operations team through a critical period, successfully migrating all servers from SAT datacenters to DFW for the SAT Datacenter closures. Managed technicians, ensured adequate shift coverage, conducted performance reviews, and motivated peers to increase their technical and business skills. Promoted to oversee both SAT1 and SAT2 facilities simultaneously.

• Earned Rack'em award for datacenter migration project
• Promoted to shift lead of both SAT1 and SAT2 simultaneously
• Assisted in interviewing and selecting contractors, some becoming full-time Rackers
• Trained and taught new datacenter and Rackspace policies and procedures

Built, quality-controlled, and racked new and existing customer managed hosting solutions in a fast-paced datacenter environment. Handled server and network device upgrades and maintenances while collaborating with fellow Rackers to resolve issues and bring customers online quickly and professionally.

• Developed new policies that were implemented company-wide
• Handled server and network device upgrades and maintenances
• Collaborated across teams to online customer solutions in a quick, professional manner