Resume

Alex Ashton
Washington, DC
email: alexashton at gmail.com

Career objectives – short-term

  • Continue to grow in current role as Software Support Analyst

Career objectives – long-term

  • Technical communication and writing

Education

  • Arizona State University
    • Bachelor of Science, Technical Communication/User Experience
    • Minor in Applied Business Data Analytics
    • Cum Laude
  • Northern Virginia Community College
    • Associate of Arts, Liberal Arts
    • Summa Cum Laude
    • Phi Kappa Theta honor society

Skills/Experience

  • Software Support and Analysis
    • Use various tools to troubleshoot and answer advanced inquiries from customers, including Snowflake, BigQuery, Google Cloud Logs Explorer, Kibana, Grafana
    • Administer customer facing systems using SendGrid, GitHub, GitLab, Looker, and internally built tools
    • Documen, report, and track customer experience feedback, feature requests, bugs and incidents using internal communication tools, JIRA and ZenDesk
    • Create, edit and promote customer-facing help center documentation
  • Technical Support Management – 10 years
    • Support platforms: Remedy, Jira, ServiceNow, ZenDesk
    • 8 years in ITIL environments, including practitioner experience in ITIL service strategy, service design, service transition and service operation
  • Asset management
    • 3 years directly managing hardware assets of a global organization
    • 7 years working in a heavily managed organization and enforcing adherence to asset management policies
  • Technical recruiting – 9 years in a hiring manager capacity
    • 1 year of direct recruiting experience – authoring/editing position descriptions, resume screening, reference checks, phone screens, face-to-face, on-boarding
  • Microsoft Office and Google Docs Suite – expert level experience
  • Windows Server Administration – experience with Active Directory, Exchange, Office 365 (including a migration from Exchange to O365), RSA, SCCM, Great Plains, print services

Professional – Relevant

  • Senior Software Support Analyst – Optoro – July 2018-present
    • Under the Client Success team, provide white-glove technical support for Optoro’s Optiturn platform
    • Process SaaS platform incident and bug reports and feature requests from external customers and internal clients
  • Technical Writer (contract) – eXtensia Technologies – August 2016-December 2016
    • Created and turned over end-user manual and engineering documentation for a hardware product developed by eXtensia Technologies for HID Global
    • Products used: Help & Manual 7, Adobe Creative Suite, Slate, GitHub, Jira, Microsoft Office, PHP Storm.
    • Skills used: HTML, CSS, XML, Linux commands, PHP
  • Global IT Support Manager – Liquidity Services – 2013-2016
    • Manager of IT Support field technicians located across the United States, England, and the Philippines
    • Set up and maintained global asset management database to account for all IT assets company-wide
    • Worked with vendors to negotiate contracts for IT hardware and software procurement
    • Acted as a primary point of contact for C-level staff in the corporate office for IT needs
    • Constant travel to field offices for projects and staff support
  • Desktop Support Manager – L3 Communications/Unisys – 2006-2013
    • Managed desktop support team contracted to the White House/Executive Office of the President under the direction of the Office of Administration
    • Interviewed, hired and led a team of 50 temporary staff in support of the 2008 presidential transition
    • Acted as primary point of contact for VIP level support, up to and including the President of the United States
    • Project manager for tech refresh program during 2009 Presidential Transition
  • Systems Administrator – URS Corporation (now AECom) – 2003-2006
    • Supported end users in primary office in Virginia, as well as secondary offices in Maryland and Ohio
    • Supported a range of IT needs from computers, phones, and other desktop hardware to servers and network infrastructure
  • Customer Service Agent – Verizon Data Services – 2003
    • Inbound telephone support for customer technical and billing needs.

Professional – Recent

  • Bartender – BadWolf Brewing Company – April 2018
    • Bartender and manager on duty for two locations; open and close duties; assisted the company with winding down operations and selling off inventory as the main facility closed in April 2018.
  • Bartender – Brew Republic Bierwerks – January 2017-March 2018
    • Bartender and manager on duty at a brewpub
    • Perform open and nightly closeout duties
    • Act as manager on duty to ensure staff schedule compliance and compliance with ABC laws and regulations

Volunteer

Atlee Theatre Boosters – 2023-Present

  • President of the Board for the 2025-2026 season
  • Served as Vice President for the 2024-2025 season
  • Served as a member/volunteer for the 2023-2024 season

IVHQ – March 2016 – April 2016

  • Two-month project in Villa Allende, Cordoba, Argentina, repairing a municipal library which sustained extensive flood damage.