Madison, Wisconsin
Chris Feyrer
I lead network and security teams, help engineers do their best work, and bring people together to keep services running.
Most recently, I led 15+ engineers across two managed services security teams at CDW. My work connected engineering, the command center, change management, and governance, with responsibility for people, service delivery, and customer escalations.
I’m looking for my next team to lead.
Now
Open to new roles
Looking for a Manager, Senior Manager, or Director role in network or security operations, managed services, or service delivery. Based in Madison and open to local or remote opportunities.
Preparing for the CISM exam this fall. Earned the Cisco Certified AI Technical Practitioner certification in September.
Working with beta testers to bring BubbleFacts to its 2.0 release.
Updated October 2026
How I work
- Understand the work before changing it. On a new project or a stalled one, I start by finding out who owns it, where it stands, and what’s getting in the way.
- Find where the time goes. We tracked engineering hours by client, which helped us see when work ran long. Then we could talk through the cause and clear the blocker or improve the process.
- Get people talking to each other. When two engineers disagreed about how upgrades were handled, I brought them together, made sure both were heard, and helped them turn the criticism into a better process.
- Count the did-rights as carefully as the do-betters. That lesson from my Switchgear leadership training stuck with me. Reviews should give accomplishments the same attention as areas for improvement.
- Make sure the steady work gets seen. The engineer who quietly keeps the queue moving deserves recognition alongside the one who handles the big outage, in both reviews and pay decisions.
Experience
2021–2026 · CDW
Managed Services Security Supervisor
Led 15+ engineers across two concurrent teams, including seven direct reports, delivering firewall, identity, and network access services across Cisco, Fortinet, Aruba, and Palo Alto platforms. Owned hiring, performance reviews, compensation decisions, customer escalations, and on-call coverage.
Led teams from both organizations following CDW’s acquisition of Sirius. Partnered with the command center to rebuild high-severity escalation routing and coordinated a monthly SOC 2 remediation cycle with engineering teams outside my reporting line, tracking fixes to closure.
Led the customer portal’s External Communications Committee and coached engineers to work directly with customers. Their work earned unsolicited client praise.
2018–2021 · CDW
Network Engineer III / Team Lead
Served as technology owner for CDW’s Palo Alto managed firewall service. Partnered with change management to automate upgrade change records and with the AIOps team to improve alert correlation.
Built and presented quarterly business reviews for clients and leadership. Hosted the Managed Services town hall and coached presenters from across the organization.
2007–2018 · CDW
Network and Operations Engineering
Started on the Berbee data center team. Worked alongside enterprise clients and senior engineers to deliver managed services enrollments from start to finish, documenting standards that guided later enrollments.
1997–2006
Help Desk to IT Manager
Built my foundation in technical support, consulting, and IT management at ExecPC, FoodSpot.com, Nonn’s, and The Shop Consulting.
Projects
2026 · Free and open source
BubbleFacts
An app for musicians who livestream. BubbleFacts displays short facts about the song being played, giving audiences something to discover while the music keeps going.
Claude Code wrote the code under my direction; the requirements, review, testing, and release decisions are mine. Community beta testers help shape each release, and generated facts are screened against their source article before appearing on stream.
It’s a personal project that puts my approach to delivery into practice: listen to the people using it, define what good looks like, and check the work before shipping.
Ongoing
Home lab
A MacBook and two repurposed 2014 Mac minis running open-source AI models locally. I use them to explore what these tools can do, understand their limits, and test workflows that keep data on hardware I control.
Music
I sing tenor with the Madison Symphony Orchestra Chorus and compose for piano. My originals are on MuseScore.
Credentials
- Cisco Certified AI Technical Practitioner, 2026
- CISM exam scheduled for fall 2026
- Cisco AI Business Practitioner learning path, completed 2026
- Switchgear Leadership and Coaching Programs
- Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt
- ITIL Foundation
BA, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Individually designed major in Multimedia Communications, including a thesis.