Straten Schemel's Resume

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Unstructured

• Deployed Unstructured on Kubernetes using Helm charts, YAML manifests, and Terraform across customer AWS, Azure, and GCP environments; delivered in-VPC and Dedicated Instance deployments.
• Engineered production platform plugins in Python and Go, using AI-assisted development to build, test, and deploy new functionality.
• Shipped five production plugins: LanceDB, Amazon S3, PII Redactor, S3 Vectors / DynamoDB, and Azure Blob Storage.
• Created a reusable agent harness to guide internal teams through building and testing source connectors, destination connectors, and platform node plugins, substantially reducing time from idea to testable plugin.
• Developed a destination-connector test suite to validate data integrity across platform integrations.
• Built golden test cases and a multilingual evaluation corpus for PII Redactor, measuring 98-99% redaction efficacy on the corpus.

Principal Cloud Architect — Cloud Workload Delivery & Adoption

Zscaler

• Built customer cloud networking across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including VPCs and Azure VNets. Organized Azure connector infrastructure in dedicated resource groups.
• Deployed Cloud Connectors and Branch Connectors with Terraform, ARM templates, and AWS CloudFormation, adapting infrastructure as code to customer cloud architectures.
• Used AI-assisted validation of Terraform scripts before and after deployments to review infrastructure definitions and check deployed configurations against customer requirements.

Federal Deployment & Enablement Specialist

Zscaler

• Served as the primary technical point of contact and escalation path for 26+ federal deployments, coordinating deployment sequencing and issue resolution with Product, Professional Services, field teams, and partners.
• Authored Cloud Connector deployment guides, troubleshooting workflows, and field/partner training for integrations, implementation, and customer handoffs.

GTM & Adoption Strategy Lead

Zscaler

• Led customer discovery and technical recovery plans for approximately 20 low-utilization enterprise accounts; more than half reached over 70% healthy adoption, contributing to five upsell opportunities.
• Diagnosed integration and adoption blockers, designed Professional Services packages to unblock stalled rollouts, and escalated recurring product gaps to Engineering and Product leadership.
• Codified recovery strategies into a repeatable playbook for QBRs, account reviews, and adoption monitoring.

Principal, Cloud Workload Deployments

Zscaler

• First hire dedicated to Cloud Workload deployments. Built the implementation process from technical kickoff through steady-state support, reducing post-deployment issues by 95%.
• Led 12 strategic enterprise implementations involving complex customer environments, pre-GA features, feature development, and custom integrations.
• Built deployment tooling and workflows adopted by Professional Services to manage implementation steps, timelines, and resource tracking, improving team efficiency by over 50%.
• Created customer-specific support handoffs documenting use cases, phased deployment plans, and customizations, reducing rediscovery and accelerating issue resolution.

Office of the CTO — Field CTO (Product Delivery & Customer Adoption)

Wiz (acquired by Google)

• Provisioned Wiz Cloud Connectors across AWS, Azure, and GCP using Terraform and AWS CloudFormation; supported Kubernetes environments through onboarding and troubleshooting.
• Led technical escalations for complex cloud deployments, working with customer InfoSec, DevOps, and engineering teams to resolve integration issues and onboarding blockers.
• Built and operationalized the global customer onboarding program, reducing time-to-steady-state to under six weeks across Fortune 500 accounts.
• Led the Intercom-to-Zendesk support migration and implemented AI-driven case routing, issue classification, and templated responses, reducing time-to-first-response from hours to under 60 seconds with 99% issue-classification accuracy.
• Designed a three-tier escalation model and 12 specialized technical support queues, reducing resolution times from weeks to under 72 hours.
• Led the enterprise identity migration from Auth0 to Amazon Cognito, enabling multi-IdP support and unlocking previously blocked enterprise use cases.

Team Lead, Solutions Architects

PerimeterX (now HUMAN Security)

• Led five Solutions Architects delivering enterprise customer integrations across retail, travel, and entertainment; managed $7.5M-$10M in quarterly onboarding projects.
• Standardized deployment automation, onboarding templates, and telemetry-based rollout strategies, reducing production deployment timelines from days to hours.
• Partnered with Product, Pre-Sales, Engineering, and GTM on custom POCs, POVs, and emergency implementations.

Senior Solutions Architect

PerimeterX (now HUMAN Security)

Deployed lightweight JS scripts on customer websites to protect high-value endpoints, including sign-up, registration, checkout, product pages, and ticketing flows.

• Built custom CAPTCHA and user-validation flows in TypeScript and React, integrating human verification challenges into a unified front-end experience.
• Implemented server-side bot protection across NGINX, Apache, PHP, .NET, Node.js, Next.js, and Go application environments.
• Deployed edge integrations on Akamai, Cloudflare Workers, Fastly VCL, and AWS Lambda@Edge, adapting implementation patterns to customer delivery infrastructure.
• Built reusable deployment scripts and integration templates for server and edge environments, reducing integration time from ~3 days to under 12 minutes.
• Instrumented bot-protection telemetry on high-value endpoints to evaluate effectiveness and demonstrate ROI for customers including Booking.com, Ticketmaster, Nike, Zillow, and Priceline.

Solutions Engineer

Cloudflare

• Onboarded customers by configuring DNS and enabling the 'orange cloud' proxy to route traffic through Cloudflare's security and CDN.
• Onboarded customers during active DDoS attacks and configured protection settings to support mitigation and remediation.
• Configured OWASP-based WAF rules and tiered caching solutions, including HTTP cache validation with ETags.
• Built and maintained a public Python wrapper for the Cloudflare REST API to automate DNS, security, and WAF configuration updates.
• Managed a $3M-$4M enterprise portfolio across 30-40 accounts, owning technical relationships throughout onboarding and adoption.

Solutions Engineer

SignalFx (acquired by Splunk)

Employee 13 and first Solutions Engineer.

• Owned customer engagements from pre-sales discovery through implementation, post-sales adoption, expansion, and support.
• Built repeatable demo playbooks and POC environments to demonstrate customer value within minutes.
• Worked with Target, Yelp, Realtor.com, and others to build real-time dashboards visualizing latency, errors, throughput, and service health.
• Established the initial QBR framework to quantify customer usage and value, guiding adoption and expansion discussions.

Solutions Architect

Apigee (acquired by Google)

• Owned customer onboarding and implementation of the Apigee Edge API management platform, configuring edge routing, authentication policies, API traffic flows, and developer portals.
• Designed RESTful APIs and delivered technical workshops and custom solutions for healthcare, finance, and retail customers.

Deployment & Support Engineer

Actiance (acquired by Smarsh)

• Deployed and supported real-time compliance, archiving, and eDiscovery solutions for global banking, legal, and telecom customers.
• Built automation scripts to manage configurations across hybrid environments, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync.