Matt Spindler

I am looking for a senior Linux systems administration, HPC, or platform engineering position where I can put nearly 20 years of Linux experience to work while continuing to move into newer infrastructure technologies. I have spent the last six years working as an engineer supporting the voice systems in NASA's Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston. It is the same basic communications environment people associate with "Houston, we have a problem." Working around Mission Control has reinforced something I learned long before NASA: when a system matters, it has to work, and when it does not, you need to be able to figure out why.

A major reason NASA hired me was to take on what we called "weird stuff"—projects and technical problems that fall outside normal day-to-day operations and do not necessarily have an established procedure waiting for them. My job has often been to understand an unusual requirement, determine what can be built with the systems and resources available, make it work, and then figure out how to normalize it so that it meets agency, facility, operational and support requirements. That kind of work fits the way I think. If you put a technical problem in front of me, I will figure it out. I do not need every answer or every tool handed to me before I can start. In many cases, the fewer assumptions and ready-made answers I have, the more creative I become about solving the actual problem.

My background is primarily Linux systems administration and infrastructure. I have worked with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, large physical and virtual server environments, VMware, storage, NFS/SMB, IBM Spectrum Scale/GPFS, networking, monitoring, patching, troubleshooting, automation, backups and disaster recovery. Earlier in my career I supported hosting infrastructure consisting of thousands of physical and virtual servers across multiple data centers. I am comfortable working a problem from the operating system and hardware level through storage and networking instead of treating each piece as a separate box.

Outside of work I am building my own Linux/HPC lab because I want practical experience with where infrastructure engineering is going. The system includes Rocky Linux servers, NVIDIA GPU compute hardware, centralized storage, 10 Gb networking, pfSense, Cisco networking equipment and KVM/libvirt. As I build it out I am learning and implementing Docker, Kubernetes, Slurm, Git, Ansible, CI/CD, Prometheus, Grafana and Zabbix, followed by Terraform/OpenTofu, Helm, GitOps and OKD/OpenShift. I do not claim years of production experience with those technologies yet. I am learning them the same way I learned Linux: build it, use it, break it, troubleshoot it and understand what is happening underneath.

I also have a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics, which gives me the foundation to push the lab beyond infrastructure administration. In parallel with the hardware I am rebuilding and extending the mathematics behind HPC, modeling and quantitative computing, including probability and statistics, linear and numerical algebra, differential equations, numerical methods and optimization. Where a project requires mathematics beyond my current working level, I have the foundation and materials to work backward through the prerequisites and learn it alongside the implementation rather than treating the mathematics as a black box.

The lab has a longer-term purpose as well. I intend to use it for HPC, mathematical and statistical computing, GPU workloads, AI/ML experimentation and eventually my own algorithmic trading research platform. That gives me a practical reason to keep developing distributed computing, containers, automation, observability, databases, networking, performance tuning and the mathematics behind the workloads.

What I would bring to a new team is nearly 20 years of Linux experience, NASA mission-critical engineering experience, a mathematical foundation and a track record of being handed problems outside the normal operating envelope and finding a way to make them work within real-world requirements. I am looking for a position where I can contribute with that experience immediately while continuing to grow into HPC and modern platform engineering.