Sevag Bardakjian

Before Disney there were two years at Geek Squad and six years running IT for a school in Pasadena on the side. Disney was the first real network job. I started as an intern on the team migrating 217 Disney Stores from DSL to T1 MPLS, then came on full time.

The big one was Shanghai Disneyland. Very few network engineers ever get to be part of opening a Disney theme park, and this was a brand new park plus two Disney hotels, built from the ground up in another country. I spent five weeks on site in Shanghai as part of the team making sure the park network was online and operational by grand opening: configuring switches and VLANs, standing up the WiFi access controls for the Disneyland Hotels, walking the site during construction, and designing the temporary network for the Good Morning America grand opening broadcast. When the gates opened, the network I helped build was underneath all of it.

Back home I ran the Disney Store WiFi refresh: 370 new Cisco access points across 120 stores in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico, finished before the holiday season with a shortened deadline, extended scope, and under budget.

I moved to Seattle and switched from building networks to supporting the people using them. I was on the team behind the nationwide launch of Amazon Books, and a lot of that job happened on the road: flying across the country to physically open new stores, setting up the point of sale and price check systems in each one. I also led the project that brought ESL digital price tags to the stores.

Back at the desk I was on call 24x7 for a retail footprint that kept growing. The number I still quote: monthly trouble ticket volume down 40% while the store count went up. Most of that came from a knowledge base I built so problems got solved once, plus new KPIs and weekly reporting to leadership so we were fixing the right things.

I joined TikTok in 2019 as a Sr IT Engineer and was running the region within three months. There was no Service Desk yet, so I built one: recruited, trained, and mentored the team covering North and South America, and grew several of those hires into sub-regional managers. I also served as site owner for the US headquarters, including moving service desk operations out of a shared office and into the new Los Angeles HQ.

In 2020 I launched two more verticals alongside the desk: Key Person (KP)/Executive Support, which I ran through 2024, and the Transparency and Accountability Center (TAC), which I led globally, building centers in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Dublin, and Singapore. By the end of this stretch I was running three verticals at once: Service Desk, TAC, and KP.

This is also where the job stopped being about tickets. I started as a team of one and hired my way to a real organization, owned the IT budget and headcount plan for the region, and grew or trimmed the org as the business demanded. I ran onboarding and offboarding for every employee in the region, including executives, managed the vendors and contracts behind every site, and became the person site leaders and executives called when something mattered. I collaborated with cross-functional partners across North and South America, APAC, and EMEA so that a region could operate as one company.

In 2023 I took over Service Operations for the Americas and rebuilt the organization from the ground up. Instead of one pool of generalists, I organized it into sub-verticals so every area had proper, redundant coverage: Networking, Systems, A/V, TAC, KP, and EMDF/Server Rooms. That structure carried a run of new office launches and stood up a small datacenter/EMDF along the way. Four verticals at the top, six underneath, one calendar.

The numbers by this point: a team of more than 40 that started as one, about a dozen sites, over 6,000 people supported, and a budget in the millions. At this level the work is mostly executive: setting strategy and budget for the region, forecasting and scaling teams ahead of the business, growing and right-sizing headcount, negotiating with vendors, running leadership and executive workshops, and reporting operational performance to leadership every week. I partner cross-functionally with Legal, Workplace, Security, HR, and my counterparts in APAC and EMEA, and I represent the Americas in global decisions about how IT is run.

A lot of this job happens on a plane. I travel constantly to run health checks on our sites, sit down with key stakeholders in person, scope new office builds, and close out decommissions. That circuit has taken me to San Jose, San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Diego, Seattle, Vancouver, Austin, Miami, New York, Washington DC, Dublin, London, Japan, and China. Add the TAC labs I own in Dublin and Singapore and the footprint spans four continents. It's the part of the role that keeps the org chart honest: you can't run that from a dashboard.

In 2026 I moved onto Infrastructure, getting our AMS sites ready for the company's return-to-office push: making sure site reliability and infrastructure could handle a large influx of returning employees, running WiFi site surveys, and finding and repairing single points of failure. On the TAC side, I worked numerous lawsuits and legal cases.