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Christopher J. Ryan

Platform Engineer | SRE | DevOps | Systems Engineering

Queen Creek, AZ 85142 +1 602-492-7273 chris.ryan@deployitall.com
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Open to remote, hybrid, or relocation (Southern California, Phoenix AZ, Southeast Michigan)

Summary

Systems engineer with 25 years of experience in infrastructure operations, configuration management, and platform reliability. Core expertise in managing large-scale Linux fleets (up to 50,000 nodes), automating configuration management with SaltStack and Ansible, and building monitoring platforms. Deep experience with bare-metal provisioning, storage systems (ZFS, CEPH, NVMe), and high-speed networking (BGP, VLANs). Background spans bare-metal CDN infrastructure, FedRAMP High cloud environments, and hybrid cloud platforms. Currently supporting API gateway platform engineering at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, focusing on stability and operational support. Expanding GPU/AI infrastructure skills through hands-on homelab projects including CUDA automation and SLURM cluster deployment.

Technical Skills

Infrastructure as Code & Config Management

Terraform (modules, state, pipelines), Ansible, SaltStack (large-scale production, regional master architecture), Packer

Bare Metal & Provisioning

Tinkerbell OSS, bare-metal provisioning, OS migrations, hardware lifecycles, kernel tuning, firmware/RAID/IPMI management, PXE/TFTP

Storage & Networking

ZFS, CEPH, NVMe, distributed filesystems, BGP (Quagga/FRR), anycast, DNS (BIND, PowerDNS), VLAN (802.1q), load balancing, traffic engineering

Security & Compliance

FedRAMP High, HIPAA, SOX, SOC2, CIS Benchmarks, TLS/SSL automation, HashiCorp Vault, Teleport

Cloud, Containerization & Orchestration

Kubernetes, Helm, EKS Anywhere, Cilium CNI, SLURM, AWS, Azure, Proxmox, OpenStack, KVM, VMware, Docker

Monitoring & Observability

Grafana, Prometheus, Zabbix, ELK Stack, Splunk, Datadog

GPU/AI Infrastructure

CUDA automation, PyTorch/TensorFlow benchmarking, NCCL concepts, NVIDIA driver stack

CI/CD & Version Control

Git, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, GitOps (ArgoCD)

Scripting & Programming

Bash, Python (scripting and automation), Go (learning / interest for custom Terraform providers)

Professional Experience

Platform Engineer (Contract)

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond
October 2024 – Present | Remote
  • Supporting reliability and security of the API gateway infrastructure for a critical financial services platform.
  • Contributing to the migration of legacy systems to modern technologies across a hybrid cloud environment.
  • Using Terraform and Ansible for configuration management and infrastructure deployments.
  • Assisting the platform team in maintaining operational stability and meeting strict security compliance requirements.

Systems Engineer — Content Delivery Networks

Viasat, Inc.
July 2023 – September 2024 | Carlsbad, CA (Remote)
  • Helped establish SRE practices for Viasat's Stream cache platform, an internal CDN operating across residential, commercial, and maritime networks.
  • Conducted R&D and built set-top box prototypes to test standalone Stream products on the internal CDN infrastructure.
  • Analyzed and reverse-engineered streaming workflows (HLS/DASH) for major content providers (Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock, DAZN) to improve integration.
  • Documented CDN selection processes and premium content delivery patterns.
  • Created training materials and ran live demonstrations for internal teams on network troubleshooting using CharlesProxy, Wireshark, and tcpdump.

Systems Engineer — Platform Engineering Team

Netskope, Inc.
March 2022 – July 2023 | Santa Clara, CA (Remote)
  • Managed SaltStack configuration across ~50,000 VMs using a regional Salt master architecture, achieving high-state completion in under 60 seconds.
  • Maintained configuration baselines and security policies in a FedRAMP High environment, streamlining custom OS image deployments.
  • Integrated HashiCorp Vault for secrets management and automated the deployment of SSL/TLS certificates.
  • Set up Teleport to provide zero-trust access, internal IAM, and 2FA for secure infrastructure access.
  • Supported operations for large-scale cloud infrastructure, reviewing peer code and scripts in an Agile team.
  • Participated in an on-call rotation, responding to monitoring alerts and investigating production issues.

Systems Engineer II / DevOps / Ops Engineer II

Limelight Networks (later EDGIO)
July 2014 – March 2022 | Tempe, AZ (Remote)
  • Promoted three times over an 8-year tenure, advancing from Operations Engineer to Systems Engineer.
  • Served as the subject matter expert for SaltStack configuration management across a fleet of ~10,000 production cache servers.
  • Led the bare-metal fleet's primary operating system migration from FreeBSD to Ubuntu Linux to enable modern software deployment lifecycles.
  • Built a proof-of-concept Tinkerbell OSS deployment stack, reducing bare-metal provisioning time from 4+ hours to minutes.
  • Configured on-demand top-of-rack VLAN changes during maintenance windows, running Kubernetes and container workloads at PXE boot to set kernel drivers, firmware, RAID, and IPMI configurations.
  • Spun up OpenNebula virtualization for developer environments, consolidating dozens of racks down to fewer than 12 hypervisors.
  • Moved production configuration management into version control, enabling safer canary and blue/green style deployments.
  • Migrated the DNS platform from BIND9 to an API-driven PowerDNS architecture with anycast using Quagga BGP.
  • Monitored network performance using traffic engineering, telemetry data, and real-time dashboards.
  • Contributed 2,200+ commits across 31 repositories and acted as a senior escalation point for complex support cases.
  • Trained 5 new engineers and completed infrastructure projects ahead of timelines.

Owner / Consultant

DeployItAll (Consulting Practice)
November 2009 – Present | Arizona
  • Independent infrastructure and systems consulting practice serving small and mid-size businesses since 2009.
  • Managing client servers, co-location, website hosting, and network administration across Windows and Linux environments.
  • Operating production infrastructure for clients using Proxmox virtualization with ZFS and CEPH storage clusters.
  • Managing deployments and configurations using Terraform and Ansible.
  • Setting up monitoring tools using Grafana and Prometheus.
  • Maintaining a production-grade homelab environment to continuously test new infrastructure tools.

Earlier Career Base

Various Roles
2001 – 2014
  • Senior Systems Engineer / NOC Roles — Phoenix NAP, Star HR, AIM IT Services, Highwinds (2008–2014)
    Administered global CDN networks, bare-metal Linux servers, and built private clouds on OpenStack. Monitored routing sessions (BGP, MPLS) and ensured strict HIPAA/PCI compliance across multiple data centers.
  • Field Service & Level 3 Support — ITZ Fixed Computers, Comcast (2001–2008)
    Supported SMB infrastructure (Microsoft SBS) and provided Level 3 technical, firmware, and network security support.
  • Robotics Engineer — ABB (2005–2006)
    Programmed articulated arm robots and PLC safety CAN-bus networks for fully automated automotive manufacturing lines.

Infrastructure Projects

Proxmox Cluster with ZFS and CEPH

  • Production-grade homelab cluster running Proxmox virtualization.
  • Configured ZFS for local storage and a CEPH cluster for distributed block/object storage.
  • Handled bare-metal management and network configurations including VLANs and interfaces bonding.

CUDA WSL Installer

  • Automated CUDA installation for WSL2 with GPU auto-detection.
  • Solved compatibility issues for Pascal-era GPUs (GTX 1080 Ti).
  • Included PyTorch/TensorFlow setup and built a community benchmark leaderboard.

SLURM Cluster Testing

  • Deployed SLURM on a Proxmox cluster to experiment with multi-node job scheduling and resource allocations.
  • Documented the configuration to serve as a reference for future production deployments.

EKS Anywhere Deployment

  • Bootstrapped a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster from scratch using EKS Anywhere on Proxmox.
  • Integrated existing storage and networking stacks, utilizing Cilium CNI, Gateway API, and BGP-based load balancing.

Education

High School Diploma

Livonia Franklin High School — Livonia, MI
2001
  • Completed Livonia Career Technical Center advanced programs for network administration and engineering (Novell CNA, CompTIA A+).

Continuous Learning

  • Running hands-on Kubernetes in a homelab environment.
  • Testing GPU/AI infrastructure concepts (CUDA automation, SLURM, NCCL).
  • Practicing modern GitOps workflows (ArgoCD) and working with AWS/Azure.
  • Using AI tooling to accelerate infrastructure automation and learning.
  • Working toward contributing to open-source tools written in Go (like Terraform providers).

Interests

Open-source software enthusiast Classic car restoration and high-performance engines Ice hockey (Center, L/R Wing) Drummer and music enthusiast