Ryan Rutherford — Senior Technical Program Manager

About Me

I build networks, programs, and the teams that run them.

I'm a Senior Technical Program Manager with 10+ years leading large-scale technical program delivery in telecommunications networks and cloud infrastructure. I helped build and operate one of the US's first greenfield 5G O-RAN networks from the ground up, scaling from 20 sites to 20,000+ while maintaining 99.99% availability targets.

Most recently at Boost Mobile, I led a 20-person cross-functional team to bring the final sites of a 450+ tower market online, served as the trusted single point of contact for C-suite executives across Echostar and Dish Network, partnered with IBM to operationalize watsonx-powered AI network operations, and supported a VMware to Rancher migration contributing to a $50M cost reduction.

Core Skills

Program & Incident Management
AI-Assisted Network Operations (IBM watsonx, agentic AI tooling)
Cloud & Infrastructure — AWS, Azure, Rancher, VMware
5G O-RAN & NOC Operations
Cross-functional Team Leadership
Agile/Scrum, Kanban & ITIL
Stakeholder & Executive Communication
ServiceNow, Jira & FCC Regulatory Reporting

Experience

Where I've Worked

Dec 2024 — Nov 2025 Boost Mobile · Littleton, CO

Senior Technical Program Manager

Sole Program/Project Manager for the Denver and Wyoming markets at the fourth-largest US cell carrier, reporting directly to the Regional VP of Network Deployment. Coordinated a 20-person cross-functional team across RF engineering, field engineering, and construction to bring the final sites of a 450+ tower market online.

Managed cross-functional teams of 9 RF engineers, 8 field engineers, and 3 construction managers to complete final market deployments
Contributed to the nationwide 24,000-site FCC coverage obligation, completed ahead of schedule
Maintained 100% of 24×7 SLAs as the sole technical point of contact for C-suite executives across Echostar and Dish Network
Led cross-functional initiative to diagnose in-store activation failures — coordinated national and local teams, piloted fixes across two markets, and established a testing and reporting methodology deployed nationally
Represented employee and executive subscribers in weekly Customer Advocacy Team meetings spanning Network, Core, RF, Platform, Operations, Retail, and Customer Care — surfacing granular network issues and driving permanent resolution
Participated in UAT for new device launches, evaluating functionality across defined test criteria prior to retail availability

Jun 2022 — Dec 2024 Boost Mobile · Littleton, CO

Incident Manager Team Lead

First Incident Manager hired for a first-of-its-kind greenfield 5G O-RAN network, responsible for building the NOC operating model from the ground up as the network scaled from 20 sites at launch to 20,000+ sites serving 80% 5G coverage of US residents.

Built foundational NOC infrastructure from scratch: training documentation, runbooks, escalation procedures, outage reporting templates, and operational standards — all against a 99.99% availability target
Coordinated data engineering and performance monitoring teams to evolve NOC capabilities from binary fault monitoring to full trend analysis — tracking dropped calls, call failures, and throughput against time-of-day and day-of-week baselines
Served as first-shift Incident Commander during major natural disaster events including the 2024 hurricane season — leading damage assessment, generator and repair triage, remote network optimization, and tower recovery coordination. Received three Commander's Awards for disaster response, one of only three national team members to receive one
Drove change management dependency conflict resolution representing the National NOC team at Change Advisory Board meetings — implemented dependency requirements in ServiceNow CRs that reduced incident creation by 25%
Supported delivery of a VMware to Rancher cloud platform migration, coordinating across the NOC to ensure continuity and contributing to a $50M cost reduction
Partnered with IBM to operationalize watsonx-powered network intelligence tools — evaluating AI recommendations, identifying monitoring blind spots, reducing false positives, and improving how insights were surfaced to operations engineers
Developed the data collection framework underlying FCC regulatory outage reporting

Jul 2015 — Jun 2022 mindSHIFT Technologies (Ricoh USA) · Ashburn, VA

Tier III / Problem Engineer

Advanced through every tier of a managed services NOC over seven years, from helpdesk to highest escalation point, supporting SMB clients across infrastructure, cloud, and security.

Progressed from NOC Engineer I through Tier III to Problem Engineer, taking on IAM, cloud, and virtualization as technical verticals
Led and coached customer care and helpdesk teams, driving adherence to ITSM best practice and implementing ITIL v4 frameworks shortly after release
Developed ServiceNow knowledgebase articles triggered by keyword during ticket creation, reducing escalation volume by surfacing solutions at lower tiers
Developed custom batch scripts to capture transient system states not reflected in standard logs, enabling diagnosis of intermittent issues
Supported Azure environments including IAM, email migration from on-premises to cloud, and end-user infrastructure troubleshooting

Education

B.S. Chemical Engineering

Virginia Polytechnic and State University (Virginia Tech)

Certifications

Google Agile Project Management — Coursera
Professional Scrum Master™ I (PSM I)
AWS Solutions Architect Associate (in progress)

RyanRutherford