Vice President, Azure Infrastructure

City National Bank | March 2020 – July 2020

Role Summary

Infrastructure leadership role during the first COVID remote-work surge at a national bank, spanning Azure migration strategy, remote-work continuity, identity modernization, cloud governance, availability monitoring, and infrastructure design guidance for application teams. The clearest evidence is rapid workforce enablement under emergency constraints while preserving longer-term cloud and security foundations.

• Led a core infrastructure team of approximately six engineers (expanded to roughly eighteen during the crisis response), serving as the bank’s only pre-existing remote-access capability and the first group transitioned to full remote work in March 2020.
• Executed rapid remote-work enablement that moved all IT staff to remote within one week and emptied the bank’s downtown Los Angeles and New York facilities to align with the governor’s emergency closure mandate; achieved 100% workforce remote transition within 30 days, with only minor adjustments required for branch-based colleagues.
• Stabilized crisis remote-work identity continuity for a national bank by scaling VPN, VDI, Microsoft 365, and Teams access behind Ping Federate, Azure AD, Microsoft Authenticator MFA, and continuous RADIUS validation, preserving secure workforce access while facilities closed under emergency mandates.
• Kept Active Directory as the coherent source for the emergency remote-access identity path while pairing Ping Federate, Azure AD, Microsoft Authenticator, and RADIUS middleware, reducing the risk that crisis-speed VPN and VDI expansion would fragment authentication or weaken auditability.
• Drove Azure foundational-infrastructure strategy with enterprise engineering teams, producing roadmap and design guidance for virtual networks, identity, access management, monitoring, and application-team migration planning.
• Reviewed infrastructure design documents and guided application teams through cloud migration, service refactoring, post-cutover cost control, and secure-access considerations, reducing the risk of one-off designs during a compressed transformation window.
• Implemented standardized project and service-management practices for cloud migration work, giving technical staff and business units clearer visibility into deliverables, risks, adoption support, and operational readiness.
• Consulted with security and compliance stakeholders on zero-trust, SIEM/SOAR, endpoint encryption, BitLocker, RBAC, and disaster-recovery considerations, aligning remote-work urgency with regulated banking control expectations.
• Supported mobile customer front-end and banking-platform architecture discussions, connecting infrastructure resilience and access control to customer-facing digital transformation rather than treating cloud migration as back-end-only work.
• Created and reviewed infrastructure design documents for application and engineering teams, helping standardize cloud, identity, monitoring, and service-refactoring decisions before workloads moved into Azure.
• Planned user adoption and transition support for new infrastructure services, reducing the risk that emergency remote-work and cloud changes would succeed technically but fail operationally for staff.
• Advanced Azure availability monitoring and proactive incident-response patterns, giving infrastructure teams better visibility into resilience during a period when remote access became a business-continuity dependency.