About Me

I started my career pulling cables and configuring switches in Muscat. These days I work on the reliability of infrastructure that a meaningful chunk of the internet runs on.

The path in between wasn't planned out. I spent eight years at Gulf Business Machines doing enterprise deployments across routing, wireless, unified comms, whatever the project needed. Then a short contract in the UK, then Cloudflare, where I moved from Network Security Engineer to Escalation Engineer to Customer Reliability Engineer. Most of the important lessons came from specific incidents, not from a plan.

A good chunk of my job is translation. An engineer will describe a routing anomaly in terms that mean nothing to a customer's leadership team, and a stakeholder will describe business impact in terms an engineer can't act on. Getting both sides talking about the same problem, in language each of them can use, is most of what makes an incident resolve faster instead of slower.

I keep collecting certifications, which I'm aware sounds like résumé padding. It isn't really about the letters after my name. Networking and security change fast enough that if I stop studying, I fall behind within a couple of years, and I've watched that happen to people I respected.