Chief Information Officer
Enterprise Transformation · AI · Cybersecurity · Software Delivery
Paul
Sapio.
Executive technology leadership — the judgment to buy, the discipline to govern, and the technical depth to build.
Chief Information Officer with 17 years of technology leadership across education and software organizations. Directs enterprise IT strategy, cybersecurity, and AI-enabled platform delivery for a six-brand, eight-campus education group — owning a $5M+ annual budget and a 20-person IT organization supporting students, faculty, and staff across 5,000+ endpoints. Delivered $900K+ in verified cost reduction through vendor consolidation, operational redesign, and purpose-built systems, with the technical depth to challenge vendors and personally validate what the teams build.
Experience
Dec 2023 — Present
Las Vegas, NV
Chief Information Officer
Mikhail Education Corporation · Promoted from Vice President of Information Technology
- Direct enterprise technology strategy and a $5M+ annual budget across six brands and eight campuses — every major investment governed by a documented build-vs-buy analysis.
- Lead and develop a 20-person IT organization supporting students, faculty, and staff on 5,000+ endpoints, with executive accountability for uptime, service levels, and business continuity.
- Delivered $900K+ in cumulative technology cost reduction since 2023 — roughly two-thirds from consolidating overlapping SaaS and vendor contracts, the balance from operational redesign and purpose-built in-house platforms.
- Own the enterprise cybersecurity and risk program — GLBA Safeguards Rule, FERPA-aligned data controls, PCI DSS scope, and NIST CSF-aligned governance, with annual audits, penetration testing, and incident response.
- Govern AI adoption enterprise-wide; delivered nine production platforms, including AI systems that have processed 300K+ responses since launch across admissions, financial aid, and student support with human-in-the-loop review.
- Set engineering standards for in-house software: multi-tenant row-level security, least-privilege access, and no-PII-by-default architecture.
Nov 2018 — Dec 2023
Las Vegas, NV
Vice President of Information Technology
Mikhail Education Corporation
- Led corporate IT operations and strategic planning across five institutional brands; promoted to CIO after five years.
- Consolidated five brands onto standardized SIS, CRM, and LMS platforms on shared cloud infrastructure, cutting per-seat licensing costs roughly 30%.
- Stood up fully remote instruction and operations for every campus in under three weeks during the 2020 shutdown — without losing an academic term or experiencing a material security incident attributable to the transition.
- Centralized five brand-level help desks into one corporate support function, cutting average ticket resolution time by roughly 40%.
Aug 2013 — Present
Full-time 2013–18, concurrent since
Co-Founder & Chief Information Officer
ChatDrive · chatdrive.com
- Founded and scaled an embeddable live-chat SaaS serving 50+ schools and nonprofits — full-time 2013–2018, operated concurrently with executive roles since.
- Routed 1M+ visitor conversations with sustained 99.9% uptime, turning website visitors into qualified admissions leads and efficiently routed support conversations.
- Replatformed the service off a no-code stack — completed without customer reinstalls, billing interruption, or subscription revenue loss.
Oct 2009 — Jul 2013
Tempe, AZ
Senior Operations Analyst & IT Director
Delta Career Education Corporation
- Directed IT infrastructure, security, and call-center analytics for a multi-campus education company — SQL reporting, staffing forecasts, and daily executive reporting.
Executive Capabilities
— Enterprise Leadership
- Enterprise technology strategy
- Digital transformation
- IT governance
- Budget & vendor management
- Contract negotiation
- Change management
- Team development
— Security, Risk & Continuity
- Cybersecurity & risk management
- GLBA Safeguards Rule
- FERPA-aligned controls
- PCI DSS
- NIST CSF
- Business continuity & disaster recovery
- Incident response
— Platforms, Data & AI
- AI governance & adoption
- AI systems integration, orchestration, evaluation & guardrails
- Enterprise architecture
- Cloud strategy
- SIS, CRM, LMS & ERP ecosystems
Education
Western Governors University
2020B.S. Cloud and Systems Administration, Information Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2023Professional Certificate (non-degree), Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence
Selected Certifications
Let’s put this to work.
Open to contract work in security, networking, AI, and SaaS development. The résumé is yours to keep — and I answer my own email.