Joel Schneider Memorial

It is with heartbreak and sadness that we announce the sudden passing of our friend and colleague, Joel Schneider.

Joel joined the Communications and Consumer Services SC team in August of 2018 as a Senior SC.  Since joining, Joel has been a strong SC leader in clients spanning the Communications and Consumer Services team.  Wherever he went, Joel was praised by both Pega sales and client teams.  

Joel was a veteran and began his career in the US Air Force in 1989, where he wrote software that tracked where multinational troops were deployed throughout the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War.  Later, as Joel returned to the US, he wrote several of the first websites and applications that the Air Force used to track senior leadership career progression. 

Upon leaving the Air Force in 1997, Joel began working for a large billing company in Cincinnati which wrote and deployed large CRM and billing systems for telecom companies.    Here Joel started as a System Analyst and built automation tools to remove as much manual operation as possible from operational processes.  As his career continued, Joel took on leadership roles in Managed Services, Application Performance Management, and Architecture.  Later, he developed a heavy focus on supporting the sales organizations by helping them sell solutions to new and existing customers.  Joel traveled quite extensively across the globe,  visiting and supporting customers in virtually every country around the globe and was rarely at home for more than a week or two at a time.

Prior to Pega, Joel was the Principal Solution Architect for Plexure, a startup mobile CRM and engagement platform. 

When not working, Joel loved to spend time with his family and travel as much as possible with them.  In December of 2017, he was able to take his youngest son on a business trip to New Zealand where they got to see the “Hobbiton” location from the famous movies.  Additionally, he was able to take the whole family to the Maldive Islands in the Indian ocean, a place he had visited on the return from a business trip to Sri Lanka years before. 

We’ve lost a wonderful colleague and friend.  Joel is survived by his wife Jennifer and two sons – Colin (who recently enlisted in the Air Force like his dad) and Jacob.