Hi, I'm Brent Beckwith,
Support Specialist
turning experience into solutions that work
Work Experience
Analyst's toolset with support professional's instinct. Diagnosing problems, querying data, and building the documentation others rely on.
Job Search / Professional Development
Sep 2025 - Present
AI-assisted development workflows and product research. Applying years of operational knowledge to learning how to build, not just maintain. Looking for a team that invests in growing its people.
AmTrust Financial Services
Cleveland, OHDesktop Specialist II
Oct 2024 - Sep 2025
Windows 11 and Microsoft 365 application support for a global, 6,000+ user operation, with hardware support spanning 20 states. The role that sharpened how I think about triage at scale, cross-team escalation, and making sure the next person can find what I found.
- •Delivered Windows 11 and Microsoft 365 application support via onsite, remote, and phone channels, consistently meeting SLA/OLA standards
- •Administered users, devices, and access through Entra, Active Directory, and Intune, and managed support tickets in ServiceNow
- •Handled full hardware lifecycle for the company's largest office: deployment, break/fix, inventory control, and depot stock maintenance
- •Analyzed hardware replacement requests from Level I technicians, verifying proper diagnosis before approval to prevent unnecessary spend
- •Consulted Level I techs on procedures and escalations; consolidated and escalated priority tickets to engineering teams requiring elevated access
- •Built documentation and knowledge-sharing resources aimed at reducing information silos between departments
Career Break
Oct 2023 - Oct 2024
Caught in a Windstream reduction in force. Relocated cross-country, renovated my home, and started exploring web development with the Odin Project, photography, and writing as possible next directions.
Windstream Communications
RemoteSecurity Analyst I → Security Engineer I
Dec 2019 - Oct 2023
Maintained the CSOC's internal web applications, databases, and backup systems. The closest I've come to a full-stack development role, maintaining and extending LAMP applications while working inside a security operations team. Notable scripts affected hundreds of network devices and checked IP reputation at scale.
- •Maintained CSOC warehousing LAMP website, wiki, and servers, the applications the security team relied on daily
- •Designed daily backups of CSOC websites and databases to AWS servers
- •Consulted with CSOC management on new site features, then built and deployed them
- •Crafted MySQL queries to pull structured, actionable data for management decision-making
- •Contributed to migration coordination between engineers and specialists
ESXi, Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, Bash, Python, Docker, AWS, Fortinet, Azure
Windstream Communications
RemoteSpecialist II
May 2011 - Dec 2019
Eight years of hosting operations, customer migrations, and escalation support. Go-to resource for Linux and web/DNS/email hosting on the team, and the person who handled customer communications when mass communication was necessary.
- •Go-to resource for Linux, web/DNS/email hosting, and email filtering for a team of 8
- •Spearheaded hosting migrations across five major ISP acquisitions (Norlight, Nuvox, Paetec, Earthlink, Broadview), covering 5,000+ domains from 60+ servers
- •Escalation point for eight Specialist I team members and four product soft rollouts
- •Wrote the analysis script for a domain lookup and disable project that saved over $15,000 monthly
- •Composed and managed customer communication campaigns across multiple migration waves
- •Investigated, harvested, and organized customer data from numerous servers and platforms during acquisitions
Linux, MySQL/MariaDB, Apache, HTML, Bash, SSH, SSL, BIND/djbdns/tinydns, Qmail, Plesk, Remedy, Metasolv
Earlier Experience
Norlight Telecommunications
Customer Support Engineer
Where it started. 800+ business customers, 95%+ satisfaction, and the Q-Excellence award that still means something to me.
- •Sunrise to sunset ownership of provisioning and operations for web, email, DNS hosting, cloud email filtering, and fax-to-email systems across 800+ business customers
- •Completed hosting and mail-filtering platform migrations for 500+ customers and authored the support documentation
- •First-response application support for 30+ company-designed customer websites and tools
- •Rotated system upgrade, on-call, and maintenance duties across 30+ servers and NFS storage
- •Earned Q-Excellence award, singular recognition out of 600+ employees
Cinergy Communications
Helpdesk Technician
Where the customer service instinct started. ISP helpdesk supporting business and residential customers across Windows and Mac, phone troubleshooting, a dash of in-person PC repair, and not just learning to talk to people, but how to listen.
Projects
bbeckwith-devwhisper-notes
Open SourceCLI tool that transcribes audio recordings into structured markdown using OpenAI Whisper for speech-to-text and Claude's streaming API for intelligent formatting. Supports batch processing, multiple model sizes, and outputs clean markdown alongside raw transcriptions.
This Portfolio
Adapted & ExtendedAI-powered portfolio with security-hardened chatbot, automated eval suite, and production observability. Adopted a production-grade codebase and made it my own. Reading unfamiliar architecture, working within existing conventions, extending functionality without breaking what was already there. The same skill set as onboarding into an enterprise system.
AI-Assisted Development
Daily Practice · Claude UserI use Claude daily for research, troubleshooting, scripting, and development. AI is a tool that enhances every knowledge worker's ability to solve problems and I advocate for its thoughtful, human-focused adoption.
- ›Daily AI-assisted development with Claude Code for scripting, automation, and problem solving
- ›Built whisper-notes: Python CLI integrating Anthropic API with streaming and OpenAI Whisper
- ›Advocates for thoughtful AI adoption that enhances the human experience, not replaces it
Education
Associate Degree, Computer Networking Systems
Newburgh, IN (GPA 3.5)
Modern Web Development
Full Stack JavaScript
Azure Fundamentals
Cloud platform fundamentals
AWS Cloud Practitioner
Cloud services training
Six Sigma
Process improvement methodology