JP
Joao Pedro Albernaz

Engineering Leadership · Telecom · Voice Security · Networks · Cloud

Joao Pedro Albernaz

I build teams that make mission-critical platforms unkillable.

I run the department that keeps mission-critical voice and network platforms running for Fortune 100 enterprises, national healthcare systems and federal customers. I lead with metrics, retain strategic accounts, build AI-ready teams, and can still read the packet capture myself when it matters.

Work with me See the work Résumé
New Braunfels, Texas · USA Brazilian–American · Portuguese & English Leading where engineering, operations and revenue meet
10+ years building and leading mission-critical infrastructure organizations
3 companies co-founded and scaled: ISP, MSP and consulting practice
F100 enterprises, national healthcare systems and federal agencies protected under my leadership
24/7 operations: the platforms my teams run cannot go down, and don't

About

From the engineer who could fix anything to the leader who owns the outcome

I operate at the intersection of telecom, networking, voice security and IT infrastructure: building ISPs, running datacenters, securing SIP and TDM environments, and keeping business-critical systems up when it matters most.

I started as the person who could fix anything technical. Founding an ISP and an MSP, owning complex customer deployments and leading critical incidents turned me into the person who can design the system, align the people and own the outcome. Today I lead the technical support organization at SecureLogix, where my team is the last line of defense for voice platforms at banks, healthcare systems and government agencies.

I'm still hands-on where it counts: reading packet captures, correlating signaling logs across datacenters, debugging SIP and PRI call flows, designing MPLS/VRF topologies. But my real value is turning that depth into stability, clear direction and measurable business results.

What keeps me out of inertia is simple: a belief to live by, a purpose to get out of bed for, and a cause worth fighting for. Mine is building teams and platforms that people can bet their business on.

Everything on this page points in one direction: executive scope, building and leading organizations where infrastructure, people and revenue meet. And I bring a bridge with me: a Brazilian–American leader equally at home running teams and customer relationships in English or Portuguese, across the US and Latin America.

How I lead

  • Own the hard problems. High-severity incidents and strategic-account escalations don't get delegated away; I lead them, then turn what we learned into runbooks, standards and training.
  • Make knowledge institutional. I convert tribal knowledge, incident forensics and even training recordings into documentation the whole organization can use.
  • Speak both languages. I partner with sales, product and customer executives, translating technical risk and opportunity into decisions leadership can act on.

Impact

Selected work

Real engagements, anonymized. Each one combines forensic technical depth with the leadership to drive a fix across organizations.

Department leadershipKPIs & operationsTurnaround

Taking over a support department and making it measurable

When I took over the technical support department, performance was anecdotal: no KPI reporting, an aging backlog, and executives with limited visibility into the team protecting the company's most strategic accounts.

  • Built the department's first KPI framework and delivered an executive report within my first 30 business days: triple-digit case volume closed across dozens of unique customer accounts.
  • Drove median resolution under two days with roughly 40% of cases resolved same-day, while clearing the full inherited backlog, issues months old included.
  • Used the data to surface systemic issues, such as recurring database-restart events with multi-day recovery impact, and turned them into staffing and engineering decisions.

Result: a department that runs on evidence instead of anecdotes, with executive leadership seeing performance, risks and capacity in every report.

Crisis leadershipSecurity & EDRFleet remediation

Restoring voice security enforcement after an EDR update broke a customer fleet

An endpoint security platform update began blocking the intrusion-prevention engine on a major healthcare customer's voice security appliances, taking enforcement offline and putting the relationship at risk.

  • Reproduced the failure in a clean lab, isolated the interaction between the EDR agent and the enforcement engine, and ruled out unsafe options, refusing to downgrade the customer onto vulnerable software.
  • Planned and led an overnight remediation, upgrading 14 appliances to a hardened release while coordinating engineering, the customer's security team and executive stakeholders.
  • Managed communication throughout: honest status, no overcommitted timelines, and a recovery plan the customer's leadership could stand behind.

Result: enforcement restored fleet-wide without a security downgrade, and an at-risk strategic account stabilized.

Voice routingDNS/ENUM forensicsFortune 100

Diagnosing intermittent call-routing failures across three datacenters

A Fortune 100 financial institution saw successful ENUM (call-routing) lookups drop intermittently, cycling unpredictably across Texas, Virginia and Arizona datacenters.

  • Captured and correlated NAPTR query traffic on ENUM probes in all three datacenters, separating healthy E.164 lookups from malformed queries the servers were correctly rejecting.
  • Proved the failures were not region-specific and traced the behavior to the customer's upstream routing engine: healthcheck timeouts were blacklisting healthy ENUM servers for minutes at a time, pulling them out of rotation.
  • Led the cross-organization conversation, briefing the customer's engineering team with evidence, a clear causal story and a specific configuration recommendation.

Result: root cause identified on the customer side without finger-pointing, a concrete fix path, and strengthened trust with a strategic account.

Root-cause analysisProduct qualityKnowledge leadership

Turning a recurring field defect into a permanent fix and a playbook

Enterprise appliances in the field were intermittently filling their disks to 100%, taking monitoring capabilities offline and generating repeat emergency tickets.

  • Diagnosed the root cause down to the exact script: a diagnostic routine backgrounded a packet capture and failed to reliably kill it, leaving a deleted-but-open multi-gigabyte file consuming the disk.
  • Documented affected versions, a step-by-step field diagnosis (df, du, lsof, process correlation), an immediate workaround and a proposed code fix for engineering.
  • Published the full analysis as a searchable knowledge-base article so any engineer on the team can resolve the issue in minutes instead of hours.

Result: repeat emergencies became a routine, documented procedure, and field evidence drove a permanent product fix.

Founder / CTOCarrier-grade networkingTeam building

Scaling a regional ISP without losing reliability

As co-founder and CTO of a regional wireless ISP, I owned the technical vision while the customer base and footprint grew rapidly.

  • Designed a carrier-grade metro architecture: datacenters, BGP peering, OSPF/MPLS rings, wireless and fiber backhaul across multiple core sites and dozens of towers.
  • Built and led the core technical team of engineers, field techs and installers, scaling delivery during rapid expansion while holding SLAs.
  • Introduced proactive monitoring, change management and clear escalation standards so the network grew without a proportional increase in outages.

Result: 500+ paying customers on high-margin services, including multi-tenant VoIP and L2/L3 transport, with reliability intact.

Leadership

I run a department the way a VP runs an organization

Metrics-driven operations, account retention, an AI-prepared team and a leadership system built to scale beyond me.

Metrics & executive accountability

  • Instituted quarterly KPI reporting to executive leadership within my first 30 business days running the department: throughput, resolution time, same-day rate, backlog age and account coverage.
  • First reporting period: triple-digit case volume closed across dozens of enterprise accounts, median resolution under two days, roughly four in ten cases resolved same-day.
  • Cleared the entire inherited backlog, including issues that had been open for months before I took over.
  • Use the data to drive decisions: staffing capacity, recurring-defect escalation to engineering, and platform-level fixes instead of repeat firefighting.

Retention & customer trust

  • Personally own recovery plans for at-risk strategic accounts: acknowledging service gaps, committing to a plan, and leading the technical execution that rebuilds confidence.
  • Drive partner initiatives with major UC vendors to address churn drivers at the integration level, not just case by case.
  • Champion cloud migration and managed-service models as durable retention strategy, using successful transitions as the proof point.
  • Partner with sales as the technical voice on POCs, RFPs, SOWs and renewal conversations, shaping solutions that sales can confidently sell and support can sustainably operate.
  • Build proactive prevention programs: certificate-renewal tracking, vulnerability prioritization and SLA/severity frameworks that stop outages before they happen.

An AI-prepared department

  • Member of the corporate AI steering team, working alongside company founders and executives on strategy, standards and governance.
  • Helped drive the company's AI platform standardization with data privacy as a core requirement, and recognized for significant cost reductions through multi-model usage.
  • Building my department into a reference implementation of AI in enterprise support: AI-assisted diagnostics, documentation and reporting workflows.
  • Committed to spreading that capability across the company, not just inside my own team.

Growing people & the org

  • Own hiring end-to-end: role design, sourcing, interviews, executive alignment, offers and onboarding, including restructuring on-call coverage as the team grows.
  • Mentor engineers through labs, live incident shadowing and packet-capture walkthroughs, deliberately moving complex work down the bench.
  • Maintain a documented people-management playbook (decision loops, coaching models, escalation standards) so the system works with or without me.
  • Design knowledge transfer into everything: succession-ready runbooks, searchable KBs and cross-training on critical architectures.

My operating system

Planning at three altitudes, principles held at all of them

I am a firm believer that planning separates results from luck. Everything I run is planned and executed at three altitudes, held to a short list of non-negotiable principles, and written down so the system performs with or without me in the room.

01 · Strategic

The where

Strategy is choosing the destination: which platforms we bet on, which risks we retire, where people and money go. If resources don't follow the choice, it was never a strategy, it was a wish. Without this altitude, an organization burns enormous energy going nowhere.

02 · Tactical

The how

Strategy only counts when it unfolds into a plan with names, resources and dates: which team moves, in what sequence, against which deadline, with what rollback. The game is won or lost in how tightly the tactical plan is tied together, and a plan without an owner and a deadline is just an intention.

03 · Operational

The execution

Execution is frequency, sequence and depth. I run it in OODA loops: observe the data, orient against evidence, decide fast, act, feed the result back. Strategy that never reaches a work order is theater; the job is finished on the floor, not in the deck.

People move people

The top of any organization is someone who brings out the best in others. I hire people better than me, ask them to prove me wrong with data, and measure myself by how many engineers outgrow my bench.

Culture is proven by results

A great climate with bad numbers is a broken culture. My team knows its numbers by heart, every role is accountable for the line it can actually influence, and we fix the system, not the blame.

Lead from the floor

I take the 2 a.m. bridge and read the packet capture myself. A leader who doesn't master the subject matter becomes hostage to it, and knowledge that hasn't been tested in practice is shallow. My lab exists so decisions are experienced, not theorized.

Ego is the enemy

Positions change: today's intern can be tomorrow's customer or boss. Respect for every trajectory is not softness, it's strategy. Help comes from where you least expect it, and no result justifies burning people on the way up.

Expertise

A leader who can still go hands-on anywhere in the stack

Carrier-grade networks & UC

  • Routing & switching · BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, VRF, MPLS/VPLS and traffic engineering for high-availability, carrier-grade networks.
  • Voice & UC · Cisco CUCM/CUBE, Asterisk/FreePBX, Avaya, 3CX; SIP/TDM carrier integration (PRI, NFAS), E.164 dial plans and SecureLogix voice security platforms.
  • Access & transport · GPON/XGPON FTTx, DOCSIS, xDSL, RF/microwave backhaul (900MHz–60GHz) and structured cabling/power.
  • Edge & perimeter · multi-vendor firewalls and edge platforms (Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Juniper, pfSense/OPNsense, Mikrotik) plus high-density Wi-Fi.

Cloud, systems & software

  • Virtualization & HCI · VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, XCP-ng, Proxmox; SAN/NAS (TrueNAS, Nimble, NetApp, EMC) for highly available storage.
  • Hybrid / multi-cloud · AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, GCP and OpenStack, with resilience, security and cost as first-class constraints.
  • Linux & Windows platforms · RHEL-family, Debian/Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Windows Server; automation with Bash, Python and Ansible.
  • Containers, CI/CD & IaC · Docker and Kubernetes-style environments, deployment pipelines built to be predictable and reversible, and Terraform-style infrastructure as code for provisioning and drift prevention.
  • Software & AI enablement · TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, plus a structured methodology for AI-assisted development applied to real products.

Observability, security & governance

  • Full-stack observability · Zabbix, PRTG, Grafana, Splunk, NETSCOUT; proactive fault detection and business-aligned SLAs/SLOs.
  • Security & risk · vulnerability assessment, packet-level forensics, DR/BCP planning and voice-security governance in regulated environments.
  • ITSM & process · Jira, Confluence and CRM platforms; queues, runbooks, change management and SLA reporting that leadership can trust.
  • Documentation culture · configuration standards and knowledge bases that make audits, handovers and onboarding straightforward.

Experience

Vendor, founder, consultant and volunteer

A decade across vendor, ISP/MSP and consulting environments, in roles where I own complex platforms, lead engineers through high-severity incidents, and partner with sales and leadership on strategic accounts.

SecureLogix San Antonio, TX 2019 – Present

Manager, Technical Support promoted from Senior Technical Support Engineer

I run the technical support department protecting voice security platforms for Fortune 100 enterprises, national healthcare systems and federal customers, and remain the senior escalation owner for the most complex cases.

  • Took over department leadership in 2026 and instituted KPI reporting to executive leadership within 30 business days: triple-digit case throughput across dozens of accounts, median resolution under two days, inherited backlog cleared.
  • Own the org: hiring end-to-end (role design, interviews, executive alignment, onboarding), on-call structure, coaching and the documentation culture that raises first-call resolution.
  • Lead retention and recovery programs for at-risk strategic accounts, partnering with sales, product leadership and major UC vendors on churn drivers, renewals and cloud migration strategy.
  • Serve on the corporate AI steering team with company founders and executives; recognized for AI cost optimization and building an AI-prepared support organization.
  • Still own the deepest escalations: multi-datacenter forensics, fleet-wide security remediations, and fixes like eliminating 100+ daily outages on an enterprise SIP trunking platform through a transport redesign.
  • Turn field experience into roadmap input, hardened defaults, permanent product fixes and searchable knowledge-base content.
Wise IT Consulting · Various clients 2018 – Present

Founder & Principal Consultant

A deliberately small consulting practice: select, non-competing engagements helping SMEs, ISPs and service providers design, stabilize and evolve their infrastructure, voice and security environments.

  • Fractional infrastructure/CTO for multiple clients: discovery, roadmapping and investment decisions across datacenters, connectivity, voice and cloud.
  • End-to-end delivery: Windows/Linux servers, firewalls, L2/L3 networks, VoIP platforms, VPN, storage and monitoring, built for maintainability.
  • Complex migrations (on-prem to cloud, legacy PBX to VoIP, single-site to multi-site) with minimal downtime and clear rollback plans.
  • Service catalogs, SLAs and support processes that turn client capabilities into recurring revenue; hands-on mentoring for internal IT and NOC teams.
Charter Communications California 2019

Headend Engineer

Maintained and troubleshot headend and hub infrastructure (off-air, satellite, microwave and digital transport) in a 24/7, high-availability environment under strict change management, prior to joining SecureLogix the same year.

Regional WISP (ISP) Orange County, CA 2016 – 2018

Co-Founder & CTO

Co-founded a wireless ISP delivering internet, voice and transport services; owned the technical vision, architecture and day-to-day reliability.

  • Designed the complete lifecycle of a carrier-grade regional network: OSPF/MPLS metro rings, multiple core sites, dozens of towers.
  • Grew to 500+ paying customers with high-margin services including multi-tenant VoIP and L2/L3 transport.
  • Built and managed the core technical team, capacity planning, vendor selection and monitoring/incident workflows that let the network scale without scaling outages.
Server ISP (MSP) 2016 – 2018

Co-Founder, CIO & Senior Systems Engineer

Co-founded an MSP delivering stable, well-designed IT services to small and mid-sized businesses.

  • Defined the service portfolio (servers, storage, backup, VoIP, network, security) with SLAs, pricing and delivery standards.
  • Designed Windows and Linux infrastructures across dozens of environments, with centralized monitoring, patching and remote management.
  • Built and led the internal technical team; served as trusted advisor to business owners on technology investment and risk.
Next Up Foundation Anaheim, CA 2015 – 2019

Volunteer IT Director

Volunteer IT leader for a youth-focused non-profit: designed and maintained networking, Wi-Fi and computer labs, and trained staff on practical, low-cost solutions that still met standards for security and reliability.

KTM 2015 – 2016

IT Director

Led daily IT operations: desktop modernization, servers, VoIP and IP CCTV, working directly with leadership to prioritize technology initiatives against business goals.

Building

Products, labs and methods I invest in

UpTract ecosystem

A modular micro-SaaS ecosystem for CRM, teams and business operations, built with TypeScript, React, Node.js and PostgreSQL. Designed from day one for AI-assisted development with clear PRDs and a focus on real sales and operations needs.

Homelab & continuous learning

A multi-hypervisor, multi-site lab (TrueNAS, XCP-ng, Proxmox, pfSense/OPNsense) used to reproduce customer scenarios, test architectures and validate best practices before they touch production.

AI-assisted development methodology

A structured way of using AI as a development and operations partner: high-quality specs, small iterative loops, testing and review gates. Applied daily, from building UpTract to converting incident forensics and training sessions into documentation.

Foundations

Education & certifications

Education

  • Computer Science Orange Coast College · Costa Mesa, CA · 2015–2016
  • Computer Engineering PUC Goiás · Goiânia, Brazil · 2014
  • Electrical Engineering PUC Goiás · Goiânia, Brazil · 2014
  • Mathematics Federal University of Goiás · Goiânia, Brazil · 2014

Certifications & training

  • MTCNAMikroTik Certified Network Associate · 2018–2021
  • IPv6 SageHurricane Electric · 2018
  • dCAA & FreePBX Certified EssentialsSangoma · 2020–2022
  • Security & incident response training Microsoft Security Incident Response · Splunk Fundamentals · Red Hat & Linux Foundation coursework

Consulting

Engagement models

Through Wise IT, I take on a limited number of select, non-competing engagements as a fractional infrastructure/CTO, principal architect or senior escalation partner.

Strategic & project-based

  • Architecture reviews & health checks · deep-dives into your ISP, network, voice or datacenter environment, with a roadmap prioritized by risk, impact and cost.
  • Critical incident & stabilization · short, intensive engagements that stop fires and put guardrails around high-risk systems.
  • Migrations & modernization · on-prem to cloud, legacy PBX to VoIP, network redesigns, with lab validation and rollback plans.
  • Sales & pre-sales support · partnering with your account teams on complex opportunities, RFPs, POCs and renewals.

Fractional infrastructure / CTO

  • Ongoing strategic ownership of your infrastructure, network and voice/UC roadmap, aligned to business priorities and budget.
  • Regular architecture and risk reviews with leadership, turning technical detail into clear decisions and trade-offs.
  • Mentoring and up-leveling your internal team through labs, shadowing and runbooks.
  • Vendor selection, contract negotiation and platform choices matched to your risk profile and growth strategy.

Contact

Let's discuss your platform, your team or your roadmap

Whether you're hiring a technical leader, need a principal architect, or want a fractional CTO for your ISP, MSP or SME, reach out directly or use the form.

Where I can help

  • Lead or level-up your infrastructure, network, voice/UC or support organization.
  • Own critical incidents, migrations or redesigns in complex environments.
  • Partner with sales and account teams as a solutions engineer or strategic technical voice.
  • Advise as a fractional infrastructure/CTO.

Location: New Braunfels, TX · Greater San Antonio / Austin

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joaopedroalbernaz

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