Ryan Macdonald
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Macdonald is a veteran technology leader and hands-on engineer with 25 years building secure, scalable hosting platforms and the teams that run them. As former SVP/CTO and long-time VP at Nexcess/Liquid Web he led platform modernization, petabyte-scale storage and GPU-accelerated ML infrastructure while driving SOC2/HIPAA/PCI compliance and measurable cost savings. He founded rfxn.com and maintains widely used open-source Linux security tools (LMD, APF, BFD, Blacklight) deployed on hundreds of thousands of servers, reflecting a rare blend of production ops expertise and community stewardship. Comfortable as player-coach, Ryan designs pragmatic architectures—OpenStack, Ceph, metal-as-a-service—while mentoring engineers into leaders and automating away toil. Recently selected for an Anthropic hackathon to build autonomous security tooling, he’s drawn to high-debt infrastructure problems and is open to building, advising, or operating the next generation of resilient systems.
12 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at McGill University
English, French
Github Skills (11)
system-administration10
sh10
automation10
linux10
script10
automations10
shell10
devops10
scripting10
bash9
cicd4
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
rfxn/linux-malware-detect
Sep 2013 - Oct 2022
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:39 releases, 4 reviews, 281 commits in 9 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the installation and configuration scripts (`install.sh`) of the Linux Malware Detect (LMD) project. Their changes focused on improving the installation process, including creating directories, linking files, and integrating with ClamAV. They also implemented features like configuration import and hot configuration reloads. The user also made significant changes to the init scripts and service files.
malware-detectionlinux-malwarelinuxlmdmalware
nexcess/octodns
Jun 2018 - Feb 2024
Tools for managing DNS across multiple providers
Contributions:8 PRs, 10 pushes, 9 branches in 5 years 8 months
providersdns
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