RICK ASHFORD

Sales Engineering Leader DOWNLOAD RESUME

17+

Years in Sales Engineering

$20M

Record Single Deal

90+

Avg eNPS Score

100%

Consistent Quota Attainment

Rick Ashford

Rick Ashford
Pflugerville, TX

About Rick

Leadership through craft and coaching.

Sales engineering leader with 17+ years building and leading high-performance SE organizations across North America and Latin America, inside a 27-year career that started in code. I specialize in enterprise infrastructure — Linux, Kubernetes, container security, and the identity layer underneath it — and I have carried that into AI: enabling partner AI practices on SUSE's Kubernetes-based LLM and RAG platform, and running local inference, RAG, and autonomous agents on a cluster I built myself. I have led teams of up to 18 SEs, recruited every one of the four SE of the Year honorees my org produced, and kept the team together: four departures in nine years of management. I closed a company-record $20M deal and won a competitive displacement at a major aerospace customer by building the STIG and audit schema that let classified workloads run on Linux. Bilingual in English and Portuguese. Outside of work I am a bedroom guitarist, avid reader, and die-hard Spurs fan.

Technical Pre-Sales Leadership
Team Development and Coaching
MEDDPICC Methodology
Revenue Growth and Ecosystems
Enterprise Cloud and Kubernetes
Bilingual EN/PT

A 27-Year Career in Technology

FROM CODE TO CORNER OFFICE

1998 - 2000

QA → Developer

InsurQuote

Insurtech · rating engine

2000 - 2001

Web Developer

Gravity Media

First mobile UI for @Task

2000 - 2005

Independent Consultant

Self-Employed

Delphi · PHP · LMS

2002 - 2004

IT Coordinator

Queensboro Shirt Co.

RPG/DB2 → LAMP integration

2004 - 2007

Deployment / Sales Engineer

Catalis Inc.

Built the SE function

2008

Systems Administrator

AdRevolution

3 months

2008 - 2016

Technical Sales Specialist

SUSE

President's Club 4×

2016 - 2022

Sales Engineering Manager

SUSE

$20M record deal

2022 - 2025

Director of Solution Architects

SUSE

$23.5M partner growth · AI platform enablement

ACCOUNT REVENUE GROWTH ($M)

CDW $$$$$$$$ to $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $8M → $17M
WWT $$ to $$$$$ $2M → $4.5M
Presidio $ to $$ $100K → $2M

Technical Expertise

FROM ENTERPRISE INFRASTRUCTURE TO AI

AI & ML

OllamaQwen3Llama 3.1Milvus (RAG)Open WebUInomic-embed-textComfyUI

Agentic

MCPOpenClawNemoClawOpenShellAgent sandboxingOn-prem inference

GPU & Accel

NVIDIA device pluginDCGMGPU schedulingTesla V100

Security

NeuVectorK8s RBACNetworkPolicyPod Security AdmissionSELinuxSTIGcert-manager / PKI

Observability

StackStatePrometheusAlertmanagerDCGM

Networking

MetalLBTraefikNetworkPolicyDNS / CloudflareTailscale

Cloud

AWSAzureGCP

Containers

KubernetesRancherK3sRancher FleetLonghornHarborPodmanNeuVector

Infrastructure

SUSE Linux EnterpriseOpenStackVMware

Automation

PythonBashAnsibleSaltFastAPI

DevOps

GitGitHub ActionsGitOpsJenkinsCI/CD

Sales

MEDDPICCTrusted AdvisorGreat Demo!SalesforceGongRFP response
Gregg Popovich

Gregg Popovich

"El Jefe", San Antonio Spurs

"I try to lead the way Pop coaches — high standards for everyone, accepted because people know it comes from genuine care for them as whole humans, not just cogs in the machine."

POUND THE ROCK

Process over outcome. Consistent coaching habits in November and in June, regardless of the stakes. The hundred-and-first blow splits the rock, but it was all that came before.

BANK CARE IN ADVANCE

Relationships built off the clock before they're needed on it. The candor only lands because the care was deposited first — at personal cost, over time.

COACH THE STAR FIRST

Direct, behavioral feedback aimed hardest at senior people. Once the best player accepts coaching in public, no one else in the room has standing to reject it.

SUCCESSION IS THE PRODUCT

Developing people who will outgrow your team is a feature, not a bug. The coaching tree is the legacy — not the wins column.

High standards fused with high, pre-paid care — applied to carefully selected people, given enough time to compound.

Projects & Labs

TECHNICAL FOCUS BEYOND THE ROLE

agent-build-tools

Automation tooling for provisioning AI agent infrastructure. Streamlines deployments of cognitive agents on enterprise k8s.

Tech context: Ansible • Kubernetes • Python

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lab-fleet

Fleet management for home lab environments - bootstrapping and orchestration at scale using modern GitOps patterns.

Tech context: GitOps • Rancher Fleet • k3s

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ash4d.com

Source for this personal website, built with modern static web tooling and high-performance delivery.

Tech context: nginx • k3s • Fleet GitOps

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ollama-code-mcp

MCP server integrating Ollama for local LLM-powered code assistance, bringing generative AI to private infrastructure.

Tech context: Ollama • LLM • MCP

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fossa-mcp

MCP server for the FOSSA API - software composition analysis, license compliance, and vulnerability data as tools for AI assistants.

Tech context: FOSSA • SCA • MCP

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neuvector-mcp

MCP server for SUSE NeuVector - 119 typed tools over container vulnerabilities, compliance, and policy. Read-only by default.

Tech context: NeuVector • Kubernetes • MCP

VIEW ON GITHUB →