JUDE NAGURNEY

Reston, VA | (703) 403-4741 | jude.nagurney@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/judenagurney | github.com/jude

Staff Engineer | Senior Software Engineer | DevOps and System Integration Specialist

Known for diving into undocumented systems and unpopular legacy codebases, with a consistent track record of restoring stalled projects and eliminating long-standing bottlenecks.

Brings 25+ years of hands-on experience across the full systems stack, with deep expertise in CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, and legacy system modernization.

Committed to automation-first DevOps practices, infrastructure-as-code adoption, and bringing neglected legacy systems under control.

Career Highlights

Formalized the Staff Engineer Career Path: Championed and defined the Staff Engineer role at L2T, securing leadership buy-in and establishing a structured career track for senior engineers, directly supporting talent retention.

Reduced Merge Request Review Times: Designed and implemented an Errbot plugin to automate open merge request reminders, reducing review timelines from over a week to under two days.

Extended SELinux Workflows: Introduced a team-wide SELinux policy workflow that removed a single-engineer bottleneck, spreading SELinux knowledge across the team and allowing any developer to work on policy-related issues.

Introduced Infrastructure-as-Code Practices: Transformed the software delivery pipeline by integrating industry-standard tools such as Puppet and Jenkins. This ensured consistent testing environments, minimized production errors, and fostered trust between development and production teams.

Extended Provisioning to Monitoring: Established the integration of Nagios (and later Zabbix) monitoring checks directly into software deliveries, closing a gap between provisioning and observability.

Areas of Expertise

Infrastructure and Automation: Infrastructure-as-Code | CI/CD Pipelines | System Integration | Monitoring Frameworks (Nagios, Zabbix)

DevOps: Virtualization (VMware, QEMU) | Containerization | Deployment Automation | Configuration Management

Database Management: PostgreSQL | MySQL | Oracle | SQLite | Database Schema Design

Systems and OS: Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, CentOS, Raspbian) | Windows | SELinux Policy Implementation

Collaboration and Leadership: Technical Mentorship | Cross-Functional Collaboration | Knowledge Sharing | Team Development

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Staff Engineer – L2T, LLC, Herndon, VA February 2023 – December 2024

Designed and delivered a structured onboarding curriculum adopted as the team standard, reducing the ramp-up time for new hires from two weeks to three days.
Introduced a sprint-cadence backlog triage process for culling stale tickets and elevating aging relevant work.
Rescued and revitalized an internal, mission-critical accounting project neglected for five years, becoming the primary maintainer and ensuring uninterrupted service. Restored stakeholder confidence and minimized operational risks.
Revived a legacy Polycom-based call routing system from scratch following a total server and database loss, restoring phones to service after months of downtime.
Successfully extended an internal VPN system to interact with a third-party eSIM provider so network traffic would appear to originate from a requested geolocation. Worked closely with the provider to troubleshoot their Asterisk AMI-based API, since this was the first time they had opened their network to an external user.
Engineered SMS-based solutions using Teltonika 4G routers (RUT360, RUT240, RUT241) and Netgear Nighthawk routers to integrate reliable, scalable messaging capabilities, eliminating the need for risky, always-on Android phones in favor of continuously powered hardware devices.
Developed a pytest plugin for testing Jinja2 templating logic, allowing for catching Jinja2 errors early during unit tests instead of waiting for more expensive integration tests.

Senior Software Engineer – L2T, LLC, Herndon, VA October 2016 – February 2023

Drove code quality and knowledge sharing by leading software change reviews, enforcing standards, and maintaining a collaborative engineering culture focused on continuous improvement.
Automated complex deployments by developing and maintaining Salt states for Nextcloud, improving system scalability, reducing manual effort, and enhancing operational efficiency.
Streamlined CI/CD pipelines by developing Jenkins jobs and automating deployment processes with Salt states and Puppet manifests, improving release efficiency and system reliability.
Optimized system compatibility by porting key projects to Raspbian for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, including rebuilding packages for ARMv7 architecture to support diverse hardware requirements.
Modernized monitoring and troubleshooting frameworks with Nagios, ensuring real-time issue detection and maintaining high operational performance across the development network.
Ported custom Nagios plugins to Zabbix external scripts, eliminating the Nagios dependency.
Mentored and developed junior engineers, fostering a collaborative team environment and equipping them with the skills to tackle complex technical challenges effectively.
Automated Android workflows with the Automate app, enabling efficient device control and monitoring of phones outside the organization’s MDM.

Software Engineer (Development Group) – Applied Security Inc., Reston, VA April 2016 – October 2016

Designed scalable cloud solutions by extending a VMware-based project to dynamically create hosts based on system usage, making better use of available resources and reducing operational costs.
Developed SMS communication capabilities by writing Python-based scripts for sending and receiving messages through Plivo and Twilio, enabling messaging integration into applications.
Automated infrastructure deployment by developing and maintaining Puppet manifests, enhancing system consistency and streamlining development and deployment processes.

Software Engineer (Security Group) – Applied Security Inc., Reston, VA March 2014 – April 2016

Introduced an SELinux strict policy workflow, opening up SELinux development to all developers across the team.
Fortified infrastructure reliability by extending Puppet configurations across development and operations environments, automating critical security updates and ensuring consistent patch deployment across all managed hosts.

Software Engineer (Engineering Group) – Applied Security Inc., Reston, VA March 2012 – March 2014

Pioneered infrastructure-as-code practices by introducing Puppet and Cobbler provisioning, reducing data center setup times and ensuring consistency across all operational environments.
Standardized infrastructure management by capturing the existing Engineering environment in Puppet manifests, streamlining deployment processes and enabling configuration control.
Modernized engineering workflows by introducing Git for version control and standardizing on RPM packaging, enhancing collaboration and accelerating development cycles across internal projects.
Bridged development and operations teams by acting as a liaison, ensuring code compatibility with SELinux policies, minimizing deployment roadblocks, and fostering cross-functional collaboration.

Software Engineer (Web Technology Group) – Applied Security Inc., Reston, VA March 2010 – March 2012

Transformed infrastructure management by deploying Puppet across DNS, Jenkins, Mercurial, and Cobbler systems, automating server configuration and ensuring consistent performance across project-specific build and test environments.
Architected a custom internal cloud solution leveraging Puppet, Cobbler, PDNS, and VMware ESX to enable rapid creation of test VM stacks, improving testing efficiency and deployment speed.
Expanded Jenkins automation capabilities by designing and extending jobs to build RPM/DEB packages, publish them to internal repositories, and deploy to test machines, streamlining CI/CD pipelines.
Developed scalable packaging solutions by writing and maintaining RPM spec files for CentOS and Debian packaging for Ubuntu, ensuring efficient deployment across diverse environments.
Maintained yum and apt repositories to support smooth package management.
Created advanced reporting tools by designing Django and Pylons-based applications for generating ad-hoc reports, improving data accessibility and decision-making processes.

Software Engineer III – NeuStar Inc., Sterling, VA March 2009 – February 2010

Secured the DNS key management system with transaction signatures (TSIGs) per RFC 2845, ensuring security for secondary zone transfers and compliance with industry standards.
Advanced DNS scalability and performance by extending and optimizing the UltraDNS Python-based XMLRPC API and AXFR/IXFR zone transfer utility (C++), enabling faster, more reliable domain updates across environments.
Enhanced query diagnostics by developing a utility to capture DNS query timing statistics, improving real-time performance monitoring and reducing troubleshooting timelines across critical systems.
Standardized build automation by establishing consistent build procedures across the UltraDNS product line, fostering operational efficiency and collaboration with off-site teams in Arizona and India.

Senior Software Engineer (Test Center Product) – StackSafe Inc., Sterling, VA November 2006 – January 2009

Designed and implemented the licensing component of the company’s flagship Test Center product enabling license enforcement. This included PostgreSQL database schema and SQLAlchemy migrations.
Optimized software deployment by building Rails-based GUI licensing and upgrade features, supported by an automated Ruby cron job to manage server checks for new releases.
Enhanced virtual storage integration by creating a Python-based storage daemon, enabling network access to virtual machine QEMU disk images using qemu-nbd and nbd-client.
Strengthened virtualization management through contributions to the Python-based management daemon, improving scalability and ensuring efficient virtual machine lifecycle operations.
Automated deployment processes by customizing the Debian installer to streamline product- specific installations and verify virtualization readiness for host systems.
Streamlined CI/CD pipelines by engineering a Python-driven nightly build system that compiled source code, deployed it to test environments, and ran smoke tests for quality assurance.
Championed QA excellence by conducting root cause analyses of build failures across Python, C++, Ruby, and Perl, driving stability through unit testing and twice-monthly bug scrubs.
Ensured infrastructure reliability by managing engineering lab configurations and automating package management with Puppet, while contributing patches to key open source projects.

Software Engineer – Cisco Systems, Herndon, VA November 2000 – September 2006

Led the development of the LMP (RFC 4204) feature for the 15454 DWDM multi-service transport platform.
Eliminated 100K lines of code by aligning divergent codebases between the 15454 and 15600 platforms, freeing up engineers from product-specific silos, and ensuring both platforms received the benefits from any new changes.
Designed and implemented the LMP interface, including the IDL, CORBA layer, and TL1 (Transaction Language 1) code, ensuring protocol communication and system integration.
Achieved interoperability success during tests with the Calient PXC at the KDDI research labs in Tokyo, resolving issues on-site within days.
Enhanced team knowledge transfer by training support engineers on the LMP feature, ensuring smooth deployment and long-term maintenance of the system.
Coordinated TL1 bug prioritization for the 15600 platform across a team of seven engineers located in California, Texas, Italy, and India.
Wrote a comprehensive TL1 regression test suite in Expect, which cut down the time to find merge errors from weeks to a single day.

OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS

Certmaster (2015): Enhanced the Fedora Certmaster project by extending Certificate Authority support beyond a single CA and hash function support beyond SHA-1, increasing flexibility and security.
Haskell Augeas FFI Bindings (2009): Developed foreign function interface bindings, enabling Haskell users to interact with the Augeas library for configuration file management.
Python-Module-for-Puppet (2009): Extended Python packaging support in Puppet to enable the installation of specific package versions, improving modularity and version control.

PUBLICATIONS

Salt to Ansible Migration Guide (January 2026, First Edition): A practical, recipe-driven guide covering 50+ migration patterns for Salt users transitioning their states to Ansible. Addresses Jinja2 migration, workflow automation, and data validation. Available on LeanPub and Gumroad.

EDUCATION

MS in Computer Science | George Mason University, Information Technology and Engineering School | 2006

BS in Computer Science | Cornell University, College of Engineering | 1990