Larry Ludlow

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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.

Experience

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Verge.io — Principal Engineer

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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 (vrg), Python/TypeScript/PowerShell SDKs, Prometheus exporter, Terraform provider
• Created automated testing framework and partnered with vendors for hardware validation
• Design and implement VergeOS solutions for multi-tenant, edge computing, and private cloud deployments

Otava — Principal Engineer / Manager / Director

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Skills

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Certifications: RHCE · RHCJA · Novell Certified Linux Engineer · HP BladeSystem Administration · Veritas Storage Foundation + HA

Contact

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LinkedIn /lludlow2