LARRY LUDLOW
Infrastructure Architect · Systems Engineer · Builder
25+ years designing, building, and operating infrastructure at scale — from bare metal to multi-cloud, from team lead to principal. I solve hard problems and build the things that other people build on.
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EXPERIENCE
Verge.io
Principal Engineer
Ann Arbor, MI
APR 2024 — PRESENT
- Resolve critical Tier 3 customer issues across virtualization, storage, and networking layers of the VergeOS platform
- Authored comprehensive technical documentation and produced video tutorials; architected and automated deployment of the VergeOS documentation site
- Built and maintain the platform's open-source tooling ecosystem — CLI, SDKs, and observability integrations (see below)
- Contributed to the Verge.io Terraform provider, expanding infrastructure-as-code capabilities
- Created automated testing framework and partnered with vendors for hardware validation; contributed to upstream KVM Windows guest drivers
- Design and implement VergeOS solutions for multi-tenant, edge computing, and private cloud deployments
Otava
Principal Engineer / Manager / Director
Ann Arbor, MI
DEC 2018 — FEB 2023
- Architected enterprise Ansible automation framework managing Cumulus network devices across multiple data centers
- Designed and deployed a highly available, distributed S3-compatible storage service as a new managed offering
- Integrated 3 client portals via microservices architecture, reducing billing operations by an estimated 95%
- Spearheaded infrastructure modernization establishing integrated support desk and CMDB across the org
- Created training programs on Ansible, GitLab, Docker, and CI/CD; established automation standards org-wide
Little Caesars Corp.
Site Reliability Engineer
Detroit, MI
FEB 2018 — DEC 2018
- Maintained CI/CD pipelines supporting all online and mobile ordering platforms for nationwide operations
- Developed Ansible and Terraform modules for multi-cloud provisioning across Azure and GCP
- Architected modular observability stack (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Grafana, AlertManager) with predictive alerting algorithms and cross-VPC federation
- Designed proof-of-concepts for managing 15,000+ remote store systems via Ansible with Puppet/Salt orchestration
North American Bancard
Sr. Linux Engineer
Troy, MI
SEP 2016 — FEB 2018
- Architected Ansible-based configuration management system for deployment, drift prevention, and PCI compliance remediation
- Built highly available ELK stack log management platform with HAProxy for enterprise-wide collection across servers and applications
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines and containerized deployments to AWS; delivered Graphite/Grafana metrics dashboards for ops and dev teams
Auto Club Group (AAA)
Manager, Server Engineering
Dearborn, MI
SEP 2012 — JUN 2016
- Directed server infrastructure across 3 data centers and 200+ remote sites — 2,400+ servers, 80+ ESX hosts
- Led four engineering teams: Unix/Linux, Microsoft, Virtualization, and Middleware platforms
- Managed $13M budget; directed $3M data center migration following corporate acquisition
University of Michigan Health System
Linux Team Lead
Ann Arbor, MI
JAN 2008 — SEP 2012
- Led support and strategic development of 250+ server multi-location enterprise Linux deployment
- Directed data center migration and consolidation of 150+ servers to a newly built facility
- Implemented Veritas Clustering, enterprise NTP services, and log aggregation platform
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SKILLS
Infrastructure / HCI
Linux / Unix
Automation & DevOps
Languages
Cloud
Observability
Containers & Orchestration
Networking & Storage
RHCE
RHCJA
Novell Certified Linux Engineer
HP BladeSystem Administration
Veritas Storage Foundation + HA
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