I treat Tier 1 like a launchpad.
Service Desk to System Administrator in under 18 months. Now at Impel.ai — and still climbing.
Scroll ↓My dad handed me a computer before I could read a word on the screen. By middle school I was self-hosting game servers for my friends, tunneling us together over a P2P VPN, and — when I needed local admin — convincing my parents to type their password into an elevated command prompt.
I was the help desk for my entire friend group long before I knew help desks had tiers. That curiosity never switched off. It just got a job.
I graduated in 2023, spent a year on a part-time customer-service gig, then joined Armory5 — a managed service provider — in 2024. Here’s how fast it moved from there.
I had worked customer service since I was 16 — pair that with the tech obsession and the Service Desk was home turf, so I was a powerhouse on it from day one. Down in the trenches, I took every call I could and topped the board on tickets closed, feedback, and hours logged. Volume was the point — I wanted the reps, and I got them.
Turns out I am comfortable being the face of a company. Armory5 put me on the road and stationed me at client sites as the primary point of contact for support and everything around it.
I kept standing in for senior staff when they were out of office — until standing in for them quietly became my title. Tier 1 to sysadmin in under a year and a half.
I brought the whole kit in-house at Impel.ai. New team, more responsibility, same trajectory: I am here to climb the ranks and take on everything they will hand me.
The far horizon is operations leadership — Director of Operations, or running a datacenter floor of my own. Every ticket closed, every late-night lab build, every cert on the pile is a step toward it.
Every night I leave an IT job to go do more IT. I build and maintain a homelab — self-hosted services, AI tooling, VPN tunnels, the works — and I’ve been running my own infrastructure since a Hamachi tunnel and a middle-school game server.
It’s where I break things on purpose, so I don’t break them at work. This site is part of it: built by me, hardened, and standing in the cloud — not on my own hardware. Impenetrable, I’d wager. If you’re reading this and you disagree: consider it a challenge. Try to get in.
No college — by design. A four-year degree is mountains of debt that a career in IT just doesn’t ask for. My boots started on the ground in the trenches at Armory5, and an MSP ages a career in dog years. I’d rather stack certs than student loans.
I’m not job hunting. My heels are dug in at Impel.ai for the long haul, and I intend to be here for the entire climb.
I’ll just keep clawing up one rung at a time — IT Engineer, Manager, Sysadmin — until I’m the one running a datacenter floor. A director can dream, right? Until then, the door stays open for a conversation, not a résumé.