Marcus Vance
Senior Systems Engineer specializing in hybrid cloud architecture, Linux environments, and infrastructure automation
Chicago
Professional Summary
Senior Systems Engineer with extensive background in architecting, automating, and maintaining enterprise infrastructure across cloud and on-premises environments. Specialized in Linux server administration, infrastructure as code, and system resilience for mission-critical operations.
Professional Experience
Calumet Infrastructure Solutions
Chicago, IL
Lead Systems Engineer
Mar 2020 – Present
- Architect and maintain hybrid infrastructure spanning multi-region AWS environments and on-premises VMware clusters supporting core logistics platforms.
- Standardized infrastructure delivery across twelve engineering teams by implementing Terraform configurations and Ansible playbooks.
- Reduced unplanned production incidents by 34% through proactive observability tooling deployment using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
- Supervised the migration of 45 bare-metal workloads to containerized environments on managed Kubernetes, reducing operational overhead.
Windy City Financial Network
Chicago, IL
Senior Systems Administrator
Jun 2015 – Feb 2020
- Maintained high-throughput Linux server fleets supporting real-time transaction processing with 99.99% availability targets.
- Automated operating system patch cycles and security baseline enforcement across 600+ Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances.
- Designed disaster recovery runbooks and conducted quarterly failover drills to ensure RPO and RTO compliance.
- Partnered with storage administrators to optimize NetApp SAN/NAS arrays, improving database I/O performance by 22%.
Midwest Managed Data Systems
Rosemont, IL
Systems Engineer
Aug 2011 – May 2015
- Administered heterogeneous server environments consisting of CentOS, Debian, and Windows Server for enterprise clients.
- Implemented centralized LDAP directory services and automated user access auditing scripts using Bash and Python.
- Resolved tier-3 infrastructure escalation tickets related to DNS routing, storage configuration, and hardware faults.
Education
Illinois Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science · Computer Engineering · Chicago, IL · 3.7 GPA · Aug 2004 – May 2008
Coursework emphasized distributed computing, operating system architecture, and network protocols.
Technical Projects
Automated Bare-Metal Provisioning Pipeline
Apr 2023 – Nov 2023
- Constructed an automated bare-metal provisioning pipeline utilizing PXE booting and Ansible, cutting server commissioning time from hours to fifteen minutes.
- Integrated automated firmware patching and hardware health validation routines before joining servers to production clusters.
Technical Skills
Linux Administration (RHEL, Ubuntu)
Terraform
Ansible
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Kubernetes
VMware vSphere
Python Scripting
Bash Automation
Prometheus & Grafana
High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Network Architecture (TCP/IP, BGP, DNS)
Languages
English
C2
German
B1
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional
Amazon Web Services · Apr 2024
Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
Red Hat · Sep 2025
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
The Linux Foundation · Nov 2021
Community Involvement
Metro Youth Tech Initiative
Chicago, IL · Sep 2022 – Jun 2024
- Volunteer Technology Mentor
- Mentored high school students in introductory Linux command-line tools, computer hardware assembly, and networking basics.