Brad Doleman

Career

I have spent twenty-five years making large, distributed infrastructure work — first as an engineer, then as an architect, and for the past several years as the person accountable for the budget, the team, and the outcome.

Brad Doleman

Infrastructure Strategy · IT Operations · Enterprise Architecture · Financial Stewardship · Vendor Governance · Team Leadership

What I do

My work sits where architecture, operations, money, and people meet. In multi-site environments those four things are the same problem. A design that cannot be operated by the team you actually have is not a design. A modernization that cannot be paid for is a slide deck. I have spent enough time on all four sides to keep them from pulling apart.

Most of my career has been in retail and industrial environments, where a network outage does not generate a ticket — it stops registers, idles crews, and costs money by the hour. That shapes how I build. I favor designs that degrade gracefully, vendors who answer the phone, and documentation that lets somebody else fix it at two in the morning.

How I lead

I put numbers on things. The fastest way to get an infrastructure budget taken seriously is to show what the current state actually costs. At Academy that meant building real telecom expense visibility before proposing a single change — and the change paid for itself.

I build teams that outlast the project. Standardized documentation, clear runbooks, and no single-point-of-failure engineers. At Tailored Brands that cut onboarding from two weeks to five days and removed dependencies that had been quietly sitting on one person.

I govern vendors instead of hoping. Most of the distributed environments I have run were delivered largely by MSPs. Managed service work rises to the level of the metrics you hold it to, and falls to the level of the ones you do not.

I stay steady when the org does not. Reorganizations, leadership changes, and restructurings are normal in long programs. The architecture has to survive them, which means the governance around it has to be written down and not resident in anyone's head.

I thought about this hard enough to write a book on it — A Field Guide for Engineers Moving Into IT Leadership, on what actually changes when a technical professional starts leading people.


Selected engagements

All infrastructure case studies →

Career history

2026
Principal Infrastructure Architect O’Reilly Auto Parts — contract
2023 – 2026
Manager, Core Technologies — Network, Voice & Database Academy Sports + Outdoors — infrastructure and IT operations leadership across 400+ locations
2022 – 2023
Team Lead, Network Operations Tailored Brands — 1,100+ locations
2019 – 2022
Senior Network Engineer & Virtual CIO PennComp — client advisory across seven commercial accounts
2018 – Present
Founder & Principal Doleman Enterprises — telecom brokerage; carrier partnerships, circuit delivery, and contract negotiation for commercial customers
2012 – 2018
Senior Manager / Network Architect Brock Group — three technical teams, 19 direct reports
2008 – 2012
Regional Network Manager Comfort Systems USA
2006 – 2008
IT Department Manager Robertson & Anschutz
1997 – 2006
Earlier roles Support and systems management, beginning with a State of Texas agency project in 1997

Capabilities

Leadership

Infrastructure and IT operations strategy, budget ownership across CAPEX and OPEX, team building and technical hiring, vendor and MSP governance, contract negotiation, SLA and KPI frameworks, business–IT alignment.

Architecture

Multi-site enterprise network design, SD-WAN, high-availability headend and core design, cloud and hybrid infrastructure, unified communications and UCaaS strategy, data center lifecycle and relocation, security architecture and network access control.

Environments

National retail, oil and gas, industrial and environmental services, professional services. On-premise, cloud, and hybrid. Internal teams, managed service providers, and mixed delivery models.


Résumé

A conventional two-page résumé is available for applications and ATS submission.

Download the résumé PDF

Prefer to talk first? [email protected]