Michael Ladd

Skokie, IL | mjladd-at-gmail | linkedin.com/in/mjladd

Summary

Engineering leader with deep roots in ML infrastructure, data engineering, and DevOps — with a track record of building high-performance platforms from the ground up and leading teams that ship at pace. Most recently built and led the AWS SageMaker-based ML platform at NCSA/IMG Academy, driving MLOps practices, hands-on model development, and cross-functional collaboration across ML, Data Science, Data Engineering, and BI teams.

Managed teams of up to 13 direct reports. Hired data engineers, and BI engineers. A strong DevOps background grounds everything I do in reliability, observability, and operational excellence.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer II: DevOps

LogicGate — Chicago, IL (Remote) | March 2026 – Present

Working as a DevOps engineer to build out and support an AWS-based Kubernetes platform.

Director of Data Engineering

NCSA / IMG Academy — Bradenton, FL (Remote) | July 2021 – Feb 2026

Led a Data Engineering organization responsible for designing and operationalizing the company’s data and ML platforms. Served as the technical and people leader across a broad data function spanning Data Engineering, Machine Learning, Data Science, Business Intelligence, Analytics, Database Management, Security, and Infrastructure.

ML Infrastructure & Platform Development

  • Architected and built out the company’s AWS SageMaker ML platform using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), establishing MLOps workflows for model training, versioning, and deployment
  • Built custom SageMaker containers for XGBoost model training, enabling data scientists to iterate faster with consistent, reproducible environments
  • Implemented CI/CD pipelines for ML container builds and deployments via GitHub Actions, reducing time from model iteration to production
  • Migrated legacy R Shiny applications to containerized infrastructure, improving reliability and maintainability of internal data products
  • Promoted AWS DataZone as the company’s cross-team data management and governance layer, enabling self-serve access to curated data assets

Data Engineering Platform

  • Stood up and scaled a Data Engineering team from inception, establishing foundational practices: version control workflow, Makefile-based builds, library versioning, configuration management, and IaC
  • Drove daily collaboration with BI and Analytics teams to manage platform reliability and operational pace
  • Remained hands-on in building and supporting both DE and ML platforms throughout tenure

People & Recruiting

  • Led and mentored 10–13 direct reports while managing contractors across Operations, Data Analytics, and Data Engineering
  • Responsible for hiring multiple Data Engineers and BI Engineers
  • Prioritized growth and learning as a people leader — proactively identified skill gaps and created development paths for team members

Reliability & Operational Excellence

  • Applied a DevOps-first mindset to data and ML platform reliability: observability, alerting, incident hygiene, and proactive issue detection before customers are impacted
  • Established engineering standards that improved platform stability as the organization scaled rapidly

Director of Systems Engineering

iProspect — Chicago, IL (Remote) | November 2017 – June 2021

Led infrastructure design and managed an implementation team through a major cloud transformation for a global digital marketing agency.

  • Designed and executed the migration from Rackspace to AWS, reducing infrastructure costs by nearly 50%
  • Planned and led the migration of two colocation-based sites to AWS
  • Built out a disaster recovery site from scratch and led recurring DR drills, ensuring business continuity in the event of a regional datacenter failure
  • Established the reliability posture of the corporate platform during a period of significant growth and organizational change

Director of Systems Engineering

Leapfrog Online — Evanston, IL | November 2007 – November 2017

Led a team of operations and database engineers supporting both data and infrastructure platforms for a performance marketing firm.

  • Guided the migration from managed infrastructure to Rackspace, then championed further modernization through configuration management tooling
  • Led the transition from Puppet to Ansible for configuration management, increasing DevOps adoption and cross-team collaboration between operations and engineering
  • Built the company’s first formalized monitoring and alerting platform using Nagios, Graphite, Ganglia, and Monit — establishing observability practices that became foundational to the organization’s reliability culture
  • Served on-call and fostered a culture of platform ownership and after-hours accountability

Skills

ML & Data Platforms: AWS SageMaker, MLOps, XGBoost, custom container development, AWS DataZone, Airflow

Infrastructure & DevOps: Terraform, Ansible, AWS (EC2, ECS, IAM, S3, and more), Docker, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Linux

Languages & Tooling: Python, Bash, Git, Jira, Grafana, Prometheus

Leadership: Team building, technical hiring, cross-functional collaboration, incident management, engineering standards

Education

Master of Information Technology (MS) — Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

Master of Music (MM) — Ball State University, Muncie, IN

Bachelor of Music Engineering (BS) — Ball State University, Muncie, IN