IT Infrastructure & Operations Leader
Robert Friend
30 years of experience keeping complex infrastructure running at scale — including 15+ years in enterprise environments.
About
I am an IT infrastructure and operations leader with deep experience in hybrid cloud, virtualization, and operational governance. I've spent 30 years keeping complex infrastructure running at scale while building the teams and processes that make it sustainable long term.
The work I'm most proud of happened during my time at First Republic Bank. We were in the middle of a major VCF and VMware Cloud on AWS modernization when the bank failed and was acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2023, one of the largest bank failures in US history. Within days we pivoted from active modernization to full stabilization of a 100+ billion dollar institution's infrastructure. We kept the lights on, kept the team together, and then spent two years methodically decommissioning the entire environment under regulatory scrutiny, arguably the toughest thing I've had to do in my career. The senior team stayed intact through all of it. That's the thing I'm most proud of, not the technology, the people.
My leadership style is simple. I hire good engineers, give them ownership, and get out of the way. I'm honest when things are uncertain. I care more about developing the people on my team than about any platform or tool. The technical credibility matters, I stay close enough to the work to earn it, but the job is really about building a team that doesn't need you to solve every problem.
I'm currently looking for my next opportunity in IT infrastructure and operations leadership. If you're building or rebuilding an infrastructure organization and you want someone who's done it before, I'd like to talk.
What colleagues say
"He has the technical depth to earn the respect of his engineering team and the leadership presence to drive complex initiatives forward."
"Bob is a hands-on, compassionate leader who empowers his team by providing both guidance and autonomy — fostering a collaborative environment where innovation thrives and team members feel supported in their professional growth."
"If you're reading this — he's what you are looking for. Don't hesitate to pull the trigger and waste the opportunity to have him show what he can do."
Experience
- Led private cloud engineering through VMware VCF modernization on VxRail, a 1,200-workload migration to VMware Cloud on AWS using HCX, and the full decommission of the bank's private cloud following the FDIC-brokered sale to JPMorgan Chase — maintaining continuous availability throughout.
- Pivoted the team within days of the bank's acquisition from active modernization work to full infrastructure stabilization, one of the largest bank failures in US history.
- Retained the senior engineering team intact through two years of sustained organizational uncertainty — a direct counter to the attrition typical of post-acquisition integrations of this size.
- Owned vendor relationships, infrastructure budget, and cross-functional coordination with security, compliance, and JPMorgan integration stakeholders across the full arc of modernization, stabilization, and wind-down.
- Built and enforced architecture standards, lifecycle management discipline, and SLA-based vulnerability remediation controls across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments.
- Owned infrastructure architecture, engineering standards, incident response, and change governance across distributed enterprise datacenters as the senior technical escalation point.
- Built vulnerability remediation program from scratch, operationalizing 30/60/90-day SLA controls and a semi-automated detection-to-closure workflow that drove security exposure to near zero.
- Deployed Aria Operations (vROps) and Log Insight, establishing monitoring baselines, proactive alerting, capacity management, and ServiceNow integration for automated incident generation.
- Developed PowerCLI and PowerShell automation to standardize configuration management and improve consistency across lifecycle and deployment procedures.
- Architected and modernized enterprise VMware platform including migration of 2,000+ workloads from legacy infrastructure across HPE BladeSystem C7000 compute, establishing new architecture standards.
- Owned capacity planning, patch governance, lifecycle management, and runbook development to reduce unplanned disruption at enterprise scale.
- Led DR program improvements through recovery topology redesign and testing cadence validating capabilities against defined RTO/RPO targets.
- De facto IT leader for multiple concurrent clients in financial services, professional services, and manufacturing. Managed infrastructure strategy, vendor relationships, and technology roadmaps.
- Designed and implemented VMware virtualization, storage, networking, and backup and recovery architectures across multiple simultaneous client engagements.
Core Competencies
Technical Expertise
Certifications