Les Aker
Systems Lead at Palantir Technologies
Virginia, United States
Summary
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SeniorLes Aker is a Systems Lead with 13 years of hands-on experience securing and operating large-scale, mixed cloud and on-premise infrastructure at Palantir. He blends deep systems-level troubleshooting (strace, tcpdump) with platform design and automation, owning stability, functionality, and maintainability across compute, storage, and physical security stacks. A pragmatic engineer, he moves quickly from one-off scripts to reusable libraries and prefers practical tooling that keeps systems reliable at scale. His side projects on GitHub skew Ruby-first with some Go, reflecting a taste for playful metaprogramming and code golf alongside production-grade work. Based in Virginia, he pairs rigorous security thinking with day-to-day ops leadership—sometimes conducting a symphony of Linux systems, sometimes elbow-deep in packet traces. Outside work he kayaks and fishes, and often invents unusual language tricks that inform both his hobby projects and pragmatic engineering style.
13 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
English
Github Skills (200)
command-line-interface10
instrumentation10
certbot10
satellite10
influxdb10
unix10
puppet10
ecosystem10
api10
github-api10
linode10
factor-authentication10
musl10
prometheus10
amazon10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
amylum/git
Nov 2015 - Dec 2022
Contributions:82 releases, 145 pushes, 3 branches in 7 years 1 month
halyard-archived/captain
Dec 2016 - Dec 2022
Puppet repo for defining my systems
Contributions:1 PR, 52 pushes, 3 branches in 6 years 1 month
puppet
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