Born and raised at a young age in Newport News, Virginia where sports were his life, AJ graduated HS and joined the US Army. He served 14 years as a Communications Specialist and served as a Recruiter. Once he transitioned from the military, he continued to use his knowledge of SATCOM, Spectrum, and Networking to pursue his now current role with Sigma Defense. He has a huge passion for helping others which he teaches his twin daughters to have and conveys that with those that he meets and works with all the time. When not working you can find him either Investing, golfing, or on the water with his daughters.
What is your role at Sigma Defense?
I am Sigma Defense’s AISR Support & Engineering Cell (ASEC) Operations Lead. With a team of 20, I ensure that all Full Motion Video (FMV) routes from Manned/Unmanned Aircraft platforms are supported by USSOCOM to our End User. I and my team have to understand the signal flow and the detailed specifics on how our network devices route traffic from start to end and be able to educate our government customer on how we are supporting the warfighter in their daily operations.
When did you join Sigma’s team?
February 2019
As the AISR Operations Lead, what development opportunities are available to your team in North Carolina?
Being charged with being the Subject Matter Experts on all things networking, it’s great to know we have the support of our government customers along with corporate to fund or reimburse training for Cisco, Linux, Microsoft, Solarwinds, etc… to enable us to stay up to date with the emerging technologies that we support.
What development and growth opportunities have you been given recently?
Having started off with this company as a Network Engineer TII with CCNA and Security + certifications, I’ve since been able to obtain my CCNP, Travel to Sigma HQs to learn processes and collaborate with other Sigma employees from other programs to expand my knowledge base of SIGDEF’s purview. I had been promoted to serve as the Training and Integration Engineer where my focus was Onboarding/Offboarding of personnel and coordination’s and validation of training with vendors. I then followed that up by yet another promotion to my current position as the ASEC Operations Lead where I get to face the customer as a representation of Sigma Defense and brief our daily scopes of work while getting to develop others to potentially follow in the same progressive state that I was able to.
When speaking with new talent, what is the biggest takeaway you want to leave about your team and or Sigma Defense?
Working with the Sigma Defense Team will allow you to grow into your networking/systems engineering roles a lot quicker than most other companies in his opinion due to the accessibility to touch, configure, & troubleshoot the devices. But you are also backed by a company that gives you the resources to succeed or offers reimbursement to those pursuing certifications which levels up everyone’s stock.
How do you explain the culture and team dynamics when speaking with new talent?
The team culture is probably my favorite part of what Sigma Defense offers because it is staffed by a majority of veterans who speak the same lingo in most instances and makes for a fun, enjoyable, yet still professional atmosphere.
What do you find most exciting about Sigma’s recent growth and the opportunities that growth presents?
The ability to collaborate with multiple agencies and contracting companies that we either provide support for or have partnered with makes for a pridefulness that I have only felt before, while serving in the military. Feels good to know we have so many companies merging and making waves with us in this space.
