Josh Pickens

As Senior Vice President of Enterprise Engineering & Operations at Citynet, Josh spearheads the strategic vision, development, and operational execution of the company’s enterprise infrastructure and IT systems.  He is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with over 27 years of experience in enterprise engineering, data centers, wide area networking, cloud architecture, virtual server infrastructure, and cybersecurity.  Mr. Pickens drives the alignment of cutting-edge technology solutions with Citynet’s business objectives, ensuring scalable, secure, and resilient systems that empower both internal operations and client-facing networks and services.

In his current role, Mr. Pickens oversees a multidisciplinary team of directors, engineers, architects, and IT professionals responsible for the design, deployment, and maintenance of Citynet’s enterprise and service provider infrastructure.  This includes managing hybrid multi-cloud environments powered by AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare, as well as on-premises data centers hosting high-availability clustered virtual server systems.  His team ensures seamless operation of critical infrastructure including network management systems (NMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, infrastructure monitoring software (IMS), and telemetry systems supporting Citynet’s suite of residential and commercial service offerings.  Additionally, Mr. Pickens directs the management of advanced networking infrastructure, leveraging Cisco’s SD-WAN, Meraki, Adtran, ADVA, and Juniper platforms to optimize robust network wide connectivity, scalability, and performance.

A key component of Mr. Pickens role is shaping Citynet’s technology roadmap.  He collaborates with executives across different corporate divisions to identify emerging technologies—such as AI, machine learning, software-defined networking, and edge computing—that can drive competitive differentiation.  His strategic foresight led to the successful migration of 80% of Citynet’s legacy workloads to virtual and cloud-native architectures, resulting in a 35% reduction in operational costs and enhanced scalability for network wide client demand.  Mr. Pickens also champions the adoption of DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) practices, fostering a culture of automation, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and operational excellence.

Mr. Pickens’ strategic vision, technical acumen, and leadership have positioned Citynet as an industry front runner in enterprise innovation and broadband deployment delivering robust, secure, and agile solutions that drive business success for clients and customers statewide.