Sevag Bardakjian

Disney was my first real network job, and it started with a lot of responsibility for an intern: a colleague and I were the only two people running the network for every Disney Store in North America. We migrated 217 stores from DSL to MPLS and handled day-to-day network operations before either of us had a full-time badge.

Full time, I owned the Disney Store infrastructure overhaul: 370 new access points across 120 stores in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico, done before the holidays, under budget. Then Disney Studios, then Disney Parks.

Then Shanghai Disney Resort: a new Disneyland and two resort hotels, built from scratch in another country. Five weeks on site getting the park network ready, and I was there for grand opening, supporting it live. Very few network engineers get to say that.

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 Amazon 4-star retail locations, 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.

Somewhere in here I stopped being the most technical person in the room and started being the one responsible for it. The org I started alone now has managers, sites on numerous continents, thousands of people who notice when something breaks, and a multi-million dollar budget. I set the strategy and the budget, hire ahead of the growth, deal with vendors, run leadership workshops, and tell leadership every week how the region is actually doing. And I spend a lot of time with Legal, Workplace, Security, HR, and APAC and EMEA, because the Americas should have a say when the company decides how IT gets 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 numerous 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.