LIU021: Justin Ryburn – The Road More Traveled with a Field CTO
Justin Ryburn, a Field CTO at Kentik who leads a 20-person SE team, discusses his career path from network engineer to vendor sales engineer to his current role involving travel, public speaking, and product strategy. He reveals the hidden costs of constant travel, including managing family responsibilities, time zone challenges, and the reality that glamorous conference locations offer little actual tourism due to packed schedules.
Summary
Justin Ryburn shares his journey into the Field CTO role, explaining that a Field CTO travels globally to meet with customers at executive levels, speaks at conferences, creates content, and feeds market insights back to product teams. He clarifies that this differs from a Tech Evangelist role (which focuses on marketing and content) as his position reports into sales and includes running a 20-person Solutions Engineering team. Justin's path was unconventional—he became interested in pre-sales engineering after working as a customer interacting with vendor SEs at Juniper and Cisco. He valued the opportunity to combine technical knowledge with business problem-solving, which motivated him to pursue two master's degrees (one in IT, one in business). The conversation explores the significant hidden costs of his glamorous-appearing lifestyle: constant travel means he's working across multiple time zones with no true nine-to-five schedule, flying 35+ hours to conferences where he might spend only 48 hours on-ground, and missing family events despite his best efforts. His wife eventually left her full-time job to manage household responsibilities and children's activities while he travels four to six times monthly. Justin emphasizes that building professional community through conferences like NANOG and industry user groups has been critical to his career, as nearly every job since his first has come through personal connections rather than online applications. He discusses the challenge of transitioning from hands-on engineering to leadership, noting that giving up technical work to mentor and enable his team has been difficult emotionally but necessary for scaling. The hosts explore how roles like Field CTO, Sales Engineer, Tech Evangelist, Developer Relations, and Forward Deployed Engineer are increasingly similar in the modern market, all requiring engineers who can communicate and interact well with others. Justin advocates that community building should start earlier in careers than it typically does, and he addresses the question of whether SE roles represent "selling your soul," arguing that one can remain ethical and technical while working in sales.
About this episode
Kevin and Alexis welcome Justin Ryburn, VP of Global Solution Engineering and Field CTO at Kentik, to discuss the realities of traveling for technical work. Justin explains the nuances of his role, which balances executive engagement, public speaking, and team leadership with the challenge of a heavy travel schedule. They also touch on the importance<a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://packetpushers.net/podcasts/life-in-uptime/liu021-justin-ryburn-the-road-more-traveled-with-a-field-cto/" title="ReadLIU021: Justin Ryburn – The Road More Traveled with a Field CTO">... Read more »</a>
Key Insights
- Justin argues that glamorous conference travel is often misleading—a trip to Auckland, New Zealand involved 38 hours of flying each way with only 48 hours on-ground, making the experience primarily about the flight and presentation rather than experiencing the location.
- He claims that working in pre-sales as an SE provided superior technical education compared to his previous service provider role because exposure to five different customers with five different network architectures gave him far more diverse technical experience than working within a single company's network.
- Justin states that nearly every job he has held since his first full-time role has come through personal connections made at industry conferences and community meetups, never through website job applications, demonstrating the career-critical importance of networking.
- He observes that when traveling constantly (4-6 times per month), the travel itself becomes part of the job experience, not something separate—there is no traditional eight-hour workday, and personal expenses blur with business expenses in ways that cannot be cleanly tracked.
- Justin contends that his wife's decision to leave her full-time job was a necessary consequence of his travel schedule, as managing household responsibilities, children's activities, and logistics while he was absent four to six times monthly required a dedicated household manager.
- He argues that transitioning from being the hands-on problem-solver to being the person who orchestrates solutions through others represents an identity shift that is difficult for engineers whose self-concept is built around being 'the technical person who knows the answer.'
- Justin claims that the rise of Forward Deployed Engineer roles represents a return to earlier business practices (proof of concepts) rather than a new innovation, as complex software vendors have always needed to prove value before purchase, especially in AI implementations.
- He states that building community earlier in one's career is important because it creates a support system for technical problem-solving, career development, and combating the isolation that comes from remote work, yet most engineers don't prioritize this until 10-15 years into their careers.
Topics
Transcript
. Welcome to Life in UpTime, the show where we talk with the people behind the networks that keep our world connected. I'm Kevin, joined by Alexis. Every week, we sit down with engineers, leaders, and builders in tech to uncover the stories behind their careers, how they started, what they learned, and where they're headed next. Our goal is simple, to help you see how far tech can take you, no matter where you start from. All right, guys, welcome back to Life and Uptime. Man, every week it gets better and better. I swear. If y'all haven't seen Kevin's performance on video, please head over to the YouTube channel that I learned we had five minutes ago. Nice…
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