Brad Lhotsky
Senior Staff Engineer at SolarWinds
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Summary
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RockstarBrad Lhotsky is a Senior Staff Engineer and DevOps/SRE leader with 16 years of experience building automation, observability, and secure systems for large agile organizations. Based in Baltimore, he has driven cross-functional teams at Craigslist and Booking.com and now contributes enterprise-grade security and backend expertise at SolarWinds. He combines deep hands-on work across distributed systems, relational and NoSQL databases, and interpreted languages with practical automation—authored Ansible playbooks that tied hardware lifecycle, asset management, ticketing, and monitoring into a cohesive platform. A longtime open-source contributor to security projects like Wazuh and OSSEC, he’s improved log aggregation, JSON syslog handling, and backend analytics—work that directly enhances SIEM/IDS fidelity. Known for embedding security into the SDLC, he also focuses on making engineers’ business impact visible through observability tooling such as Grafana, Elasticsearch, and Kafka.
15 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
English
Github Skills (14)
c1710
security10
json10
network-intrusion-detection10
c1110
data-integrity10
log-analysis10
intrusion-detection10
sia10
ossec10
incident-response9
file-security8
file-monitoring8
vulnerability-detection8
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
ossec/ossec-hids
Sep 2012 - Aug 2016
OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:32 commits, 13 PRs, 6 pushes in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Brad primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the OSSEC HIDS system, focusing on enhancements to the `ossec-analysisd` component by adding an accumulator feature. This feature allows for the aggregation of data across multiple log entries. Furthermore, the user modified code related to handling JSON formatted syslog output using the cJSON library, and fixed some issues relating to IP address validation. These commits indicate a focus on improving log processing and data handling within the intrusion detection system.
policyloganalyzerreal-time-detectionintegritypolicy-monitoring
wazuh/wazuh
Nov 2015 - Aug 2016
Wazuh - The Open Source Security Platform. Unified XDR and SIEM protection for endpoints and cloud workloads.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:3 commits, 3 PRs, 2 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Brad contributed significantly to the OSSEC security platform by implementing and enhancing backend features. They added an accumulator feature to the `ossec-analysisd` component, enabling data aggregation across log entries using an ID field, and refactored the API for hash operations and the accumulator logic. The user also updated the csyslog JSON output to utilize the cJSON library, improving the way alerts are formatted. Further contributions involved resolving linking and library issues, as well as fixing test failures.
malware-detectionendpointscompliancecloud-securitysecurity-hardening
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