2000 – 2002
Riverstone Networks
Two years in Santa Clara, at the carrier and metropolitan-network edge.
The one chapter of this career set entirely outside Brazil. Riverstone Networks, a metropolitan-area-network equipment vendor based in Santa Clara, California, brought a move to the United States on an H1-B1 work visa. Riverstone had an unusual lineage of its own: originally a company called Yago, acquired by Cabletron around 1998, and re-emerged as an independent company through a spin-off in 2001. It was later acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2006.
The corporate lineage
Tier-III support and knowledge management
The role carried two titles across two years: product support engineer and knowledge-management coordinator. As a Tier-III technical-support specialist, the work was third-level escalation, recreating customer scenarios in the lab, regression testing, and bug verification. As knowledge-management coordinator, it was building and organizing the knowledge base the rest of support relied on, alongside product-marketing support and internal training. This was the deepest technical-support work of the career, at the level where the hardest problems escalate.
The metropolitan-network world
The technologies were the backbone of the early-2000s carrier and metro era: Gigabit Ethernet, MPLS, metropolitan-area switching and routing, and wide-area IP routing including BGP. Working at the vendor's third-level support meant seeing how these systems behaved at the edges, under the conditions that only surface in production at scale. It also delivered formal instruction: Riverstone concepts, features, and configuration training, and customer-support issue-identification and escalation-procedure training.
Certifications
Riverstone Certified Networking Professional (RCNP), 2001. United States educational-equivalency evaluation recognizing a background equivalent to a bachelor's degree in computer science and a bachelor's degree in business administration, completed in 2001 as part of the H1-B1 visa process.