From EMT to Director of Operations: Sam's 10 Year Royal Career Path

Ten years is a long time to run toward hard things.

Samantha Barakat joined Royal Ambulance in 2016 as an EMT working out of our San Leandro station. She didn't stay in one lane for long. Field Training Officer. Operations Supervisor. Talent Development Manager. Director of Operations. Each role was a version of the same pattern: master it, then ask what else needs doing.

As Director of Operations, Sam touches every part of how this organization runs: the partnerships we hold with health systems and fire departments, the crews we put on the road, the infrastructure that makes it all work when something goes sideways.

The Berkeley Fire partnership, supporting mental health patient transports across the East Bay, is hers. She built the relationships, manages both the crew-facing and customer-facing sides, and keeps the service running at a level that, in our President Hasieb Lemar's words, "outpaces what they were expecting of us."

At UCSF, she built the transport infrastructure for the pediatric NICU and PICU programs: hiring the teams, coordinating training, and establishing the team lead structure. When their Oakland helipad temporarily closed, she engineered a transport solution with a 15-minute response time requirement. She didn't escalate the problem. She solved it.

That work, Berkeley Fire, UCSF, and the Stanford-Sequoia partnership that helps decompress ALS patients out of Stanford Hospital, all face outward. Clients, health systems, patients. That's one version of her leadership.

Career Bridge is an entirely different version.

The program connects Royal team members with structured pathways into specialty service lines, with healthcare and fire service partners across the Bay Area. It came from Sam seeing what her people needed and deciding to build it before anyone asked her to.

Sam started as an EMT without a program like this. She built the thing she wished had existed for her, then handed it to the people coming up behind her.

"Leading that program means investing in someone's future before anyone else asks us to," she says. "That's the part of the work that lasts."

Steve Grau, our CEO, describes her the way you'd describe someone who never stops raising their own ceiling: "She's so hungry to learn. She shows up as the kind of leader people want to follow."

Hasieb puts it plainly: "I'm able to shift my priorities and do other things because I know Sam has got everything else within the organization."

Ten years. Five roles. Partnerships with Berkeley Fire, UCSF, Stanford and more. We're grateful she's ours!

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Happy 10 years, Sam. From everyone at Royal.