Larry Ploetz

Larry Ploetz has worked in the IT field for over 40 years. Larry began their career in 1979 as a Systems Programmer and Programmer/Consultant, Systems Programmer at the University of Southern California. Larry then moved to the University of Southern California, Information Technology in 1986 as a Systems Programmer. In 1990, they became a Systems Programmer at Stanford Hospital. Larry then joined Stanford University in 1992 as a Systems Administrator, where they were responsible for Linux, Solaris, and AIX Unix systems. Larry led a team that transitioned from primarily Solaris to Linux and implemented standards for hardware, OS, services, and tiered service offerings to clients. In 2007, they became a Technical Lead Systems Administrator at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where they were responsible for all aspects of Solaris and Linux administration, networking, security and firewalling, VPN point-to-point and remote access, backup and disaster recovery, NFS, mail, FTP, database access, web, DNS, service monitoring, proxying, the JIRA trouble ticket system, NIS and user management, system, service, and OS virtualization, disk storage, recovery, direct attached disks, arrays, and space management, hardware selection, implementation, monitoring, and maintenance, high performance compute clusters, and job scheduling. In 2013, they joined FireEye, Inc. as a Linux System Administrator, where they were responsible for cloud infrastructure services and for select cloud offerings, and rotated 24x7 oncall responsibilities with the other team members. Finally, in 2016, they became an Operations Engineer at Pinger.

Larry Ploetz attended Los Altos High School from 1970 to 1974, where they received a high school diploma. Larry then attended Foothill College from 1975 to 1977, studying drama. Finally, they attended California State University - East Bay from 1997 to 2000, where they studied Computer Science.