Newsroom
We’re proud to celebrate the career progression of present and future leaders in Kansas City’s tech industry through our Landed series. Navigate the edition below to explore Jayson Tobias's road to becoming Arista's Systems Engineer in Kansas City.
DEPARTED: NVisionKC | Chief Information Officer
LANDED: Arista | Systems Engineer
WHAT DREW YOU TO ARISTA?
With over twenty years’ experience in the technology partner landscape, I felt as though I had a good understanding of what the environment would be at other major manufacturers and vendors in the area. In my first interactions with Arista, it immediately struck me that this company was operating on a different plane. Those initial impressions have held true through my first 100 days, and are further supported by my coworkers that have spent years and decades with this organization. The entirety of the company is built around building the best software and hardware solutions possible and anything that contends with those objectives is sidelined. That message comes from the top down. There are no egos, there is no marketing hype - it is an engineering-led organization to an absolute that works to solve problems on the leading edge of technology, not create them. As someone who has spent far too much time solving preventable problems in real-time, it is a paradigm shift that must be experienced to be believed.
WHAT DO YOU ENVISION AS THE FUTURE OF TECH IN KANSAS CITY?
In my first three months I have been very pleasantly surprised by the amount of capital investment being made in the data center and AI space, especially by entrepreneurs and startups in areas that I did not foresee. We’ve seen other metro areas lose significant talent through buyouts and acquisition; I would love to see said local outfits grow into industry leaders organically and keep that investment, employment, and thought leadership in Kansas City and not lose it to other domestic or international interests. The KC metro is in a position to be exceedingly successful, and I and the team are responsible for providing the resources locally to do so.
HOW WILL YOUR NEW ROLE HELP PAVE THE WAY FOR YOUR VISION OF KC'S TECH INDUSTRY?
In the 2000’s the first Arista products sold were to high-frequency trading and high-performance computing firms who demanded the utmost in performance and reliability. In the 2010’s our management platforms were built cloud-first to scale up in almost limitless fashion. As Meta, Google, AWS, and Microsoft come to town they will be running on Arista gear. But these same technologies were built to scale down as well - meaning every organization large or small can benefit from every advancement, not just the cloud titans. My role is to show IT leadership that they can receive these same benefits without additional capital or operational investment - and when the time comes to scale, we can do that as well.
Have you landed a new tech role or has your organization landed a sharp new hire? We'd love to help spread the word! KCTC members are invited to reach out for an opportunity to be highlighted in a future edition.