Summary
Early Ehlinger is a Principal Engineer with 11+ years of modern software experience and a multi-decade career building systems from low-level firmware to cloud-native platforms. Based in Lake Charles, LA, he blends hands-on coding with architecture and engineering leadership—comfortable as both a "code monkey" and a technical lead—most recently at Cerby after senior roles at Earnest. He has deep expertise in distributed systems, Cassandra/DataStax migrations, AWS automation, and platform engineering, and has repeatedly owned end-to-end projects from design systems to production backup/restore solutions. Early also runs a long-running personal playground (thenewentity.com) for experimenting with games and web tech, reflecting a lasting appetite for tinkering and rapid prototyping. Colleagues describe him as a teacher and learner who thrives in teams that push him to grow while he raises the bar for reliability and maintainability. His background ranges from Compaq firmware and ProLiant clustering to modern cloud migrations, giving him a rare full-stack perspective on system design.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at The University of Alabama