FRONTLINE UNSCRIPTED — EPISODE 3 - Fernando Ferreyra didn’t give up his field service career — he evolved it. In the latest episode of Frontline Unscripted, the QuidelOrtho service engineer shares what the transition from FSE to remote technical support taught him about career growth, work-life balance, and why the human side of service can’t be automated away.
There’s a version of a field service career that hasn’t changed much in decades: take the territory, log the miles, fix the equipment, repeat. Fernando Ferreyra lived that version - and was very good at it. A three-time Ambassador Club award winner at QuidelOrtho, recognized as a top-performing field service engineer nationally. But when his daughters were born and his wife returned to school to become a nurse practitioner, the calculus changed.
Not with regret. With intention.
Fernando’s move into a second-level remote support role — troubleshooting complex issues for field engineers and customers without leaving home — wasn’t a step back. It was a natural next step that gave him the ability to scale the part of the job he’d always loved most: solving hard problems and helping the people around him do the same.
Career Paths in Service Are Rarely Straight - and That’s the Point
Fernando came to field service the long way around — through a technical high school in Argentina, a medical laboratory technician degree in the US, years in a blood bank and at the United Nations, and a growing curiosity about the engineers who showed up to fix the equipment he used every day.
That background gave him something that proved invaluable in the field: he’d been the customer. He understood the urgency when equipment goes down, the pressure of a lab that can’t run results, and the relief when someone shows up and actually fixes it. “Sometimes you don’t just fix the equipment,” he says. “You gotta fix the customer first.”
It’s a reminder that the technical and the human are inseparable in service — and that the best engineers are fluent in both.
Work-Life Balance Isn’t a Perk - It’s a Retention Strategy
Fernando’s story is also a quiet case study in what it means for an organization to actually support its people at different stages of life. His transition to remote support happened to coincide with his wife going back to school. Today, he’s the one at home when the kids get off the bus. She’s the one building her nursing career. They take turns. It works.
But it only works because QuidelOrtho offered a career path that made it possible. The question for service leaders isn’t whether your technicians value flexibility — they do. It’s whether your organization has built the options that make it real.
As Fernando puts it: “When you take care of them, it shows everywhere.” The top performers — the ones who hold teams together, raise the bar on service quality, and keep customers coming back — are not infinite resources. They’re people in a particular season of life, weighing whether the role they’re in still fits.
On AI: Useful, But Not the Point
Fernando is, by his own admission, a technology enthusiast. He builds computers at home, tracks new AI tools, and uses them daily in his role to search parts, pull procedures, and work through technical queries faster. He’s not skeptical of AI — he’s a genuine believer in its practical utility.
And yet he’s clear: it isn’t replacing the field. “Customers still want to talk to somebody. An engineer to come to the site. I think we still want the human connection.”
It’s a perspective we hear again and again from frontline voices — and it’s worth service leaders keeping front of mind as AI investment continues to accelerate. Technology optimizes the work. It doesn’t replace the relationship.
Fernando closes the episode with a quote he’s carried since his early career days: “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.” It’s the kind of quiet wisdom that doesn’t require a slide deck. It just requires a leader willing to listen.
Listen to Episode 3 of Frontline Unscripted: