James Laska
Senior Director Of Software Engineering at Red Hat
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJames Laska is a seasoned software engineering leader with 18 years of experience driving large-scale, enterprise-grade products and teams from hands-on QA and automation to senior engineering leadership. Based in Raleigh, NC, he currently oversees multiple teams at Red Hat responsible for both self-managed and managed Kubernetes and OpenShift offerings, having previously scaled Ansible Tower and built its CI/CD and validation frameworks. He combines deep operational expertise—evident from contributions to the Ansible AWX build and packaging workflows—with product stewardship across analytics and security platforms like Red Hat Insights and Advanced Cluster Security. Known for growing and mentoring high-performing engineering organizations, he pairs pragmatic release engineering skills with a long history of cross-platform testing across IBM Power and z systems. A Penn State computer science graduate, he brings a rare blend of low-level systems testing experience and modern cloud-native product leadership.
18 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science and Engineering, Bachelor of Science Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State University
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (11)
packaging10
automation10
ansible-galaxy10
automations10
python10
rpm10
package10
build-automation10
packager10
setuptools10
ansible10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
ansible/awx
Feb 2014 - Aug 2017
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is one of the upstream projects for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:296 commits, 2 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on improving the build and packaging workflow for the Ansible AWX project. Their contributions included updating the RPM build process, creating aliases for generating RPM and DEB sdist packages, and streamlining the debian build process using dh-python2. They also modified the setup.py file, which included changes to byte-compilation and file exclusion during packaging, showing expertise in build automation. Additionally, the user updated the sosreport plugin to gather more information from the tower.
pythondjangored-hathatupstream
jlaska/hass-config
Oct 2022 - Aug 2024
Contributions:112 pushes, 3 branches in 1 year 10 months
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