Jason Grey

Email: jason@jason-grey.com
Web: www.jason-grey.com
Phone: (612) 229-6559
Location: Edina, MN, USA

Professional Profile Link to heading

A systems-focused engineer with 40+ years of hands-on experience, from bare metal to petabyte-scale distributed infrastructure. Deep roots in Unix/Linux systems administration, automation, database management, and high-traffic web architecture. Equally comfortable debugging a kernel panic, tuning a MariaDB cluster, or designing deployment pipelines that serve billions of requests.

Core Technical Skills Link to heading

  • Operating Systems: Linux (Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, Arch), FreeBSD, Unix-like environments. Deep experience with systemd, networking stack, filesystem tuning, and kernel-level troubleshooting.
  • Infrastructure & Automation: Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform. CI/CD via GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines. Strong belief in infrastructure-as-code and eliminating manual toil.
  • Databases: 30+ years across MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Redis, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, Cassandra. Performance tuning, replication, clustering, schema design.
  • Scripting & Languages: Python, Go, Rust, Perl, Shell (Bash/Zsh). Comfortable writing system-level tooling, automation scripts, and CLI utilities from scratch.
  • Web Infrastructure: Apache HTTPD, Nginx, reverse proxy configuration, TLS/SSL management, load balancing, CDN integration. Experience architecting for billion-page-view-per-day traffic levels.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Custom metric collection pipelines, log aggregation, alerting design. Built monitoring for petabyte-scale data processing systems.
  • Storage & Filesystems: ZFS, NFS, network-attached storage, S3-compatible object stores. Experience managing multi-petabyte data at Common Crawl.
  • Networking & Security: Firewall configuration (iptables, UFW), VPN, TCP/IP protocol debugging, DNS, MTA administration (Postfix). Member of EFF; security-first mindset.
  • Hardware: x86-64 and ARM platforms. History of co-location and physical datacenter management.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS (early adopter, pre-2008), Azure, Google Cloud, Rackspace. Virtualization via KVM, VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox.

Key Experience Link to heading

Kagi.com (consulting) Link to heading

June 2025 - Present

  • Team lead for top company priority: AI Context layer + Internal Search Index
  • Infrastructure and systems architecture for search platform

Sr. Engineer at Common Crawl Foundation (1 year contract) Link to heading

Feb 2024 - Mar 2025

  • Built and maintained Apache Spark jobs processing 9PB+ of web crawl data across distributed clusters
  • Orchestrated data pipelines with Apache Airflow, managing scheduling, integrity checks, and failure recovery
  • Refactored index server infrastructure: modernized deployment, automated rate limiting and ACL management
  • Improved documentation, monitoring, and operational runbooks for the crawl processing pipeline

CTO at Warecorp Link to heading

Jan 2017 - Oct 2025

  • Managed infrastructure and deployment architecture for clients ranging from NVIDIA to early-stage startups
  • Designed and operated containerized deployment pipelines (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm)
  • Administered database clusters (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis) across multiple client environments
  • Maintained CI/CD systems, monitoring, and incident response processes

Sr. Vice President, Chief of Technology at Life Time Fitness Link to heading

Jan 2012 - Aug 2015

  • Managed 250-person IT/Engineering organization including infrastructure, networking, and systems teams
  • Modernized data warehousing, established enterprise architecture practices, and led platform migrations
  • Oversaw datacenter operations, vendor management, and technology procurement

Earlier Systems & Infrastructure Work Link to heading

  • Co-location and physical datacenter management (self-hosted infrastructure)
  • Early AWS adopter (S3, SQS, EC2 era) — built distributed systems on cloud before it was mainstream
  • Built and operated Hadoop/HDFS clusters for hyper-local news aggregation (2008)
  • Extensive consulting across Target, Nike, United Health Group, 5/3 Bank, Kenneth Cole, and Bauer Hockey

Full history: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasongrey/

Open Source & Community Link to heading

  • Active contributor to open source projects; authored CLI tools in Rust (gz-inspector, Eddie search engine)
  • Member of ACM, IEEE, AAAI, EFF
  • Technical writer — publishes on systems architecture, distributed systems, and infrastructure topics
    ← www.jasminelow.com · Kagi Small Web · Random · www.jasoncollins.blog →