JC John Cuckovich
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SENIOR PLATFORM ENGINEER  ·  MOUNT DORA, FL

John Cuckovich

I build greenfield private-cloud platforms — and the automation that makes them repeatable.

Platform engineer specializing in VMware Cloud Foundation, high-availability HashiCorp Vault, and end-to-end infrastructure automation — building the greenfield private-cloud platforms that operations teams run in production, and the automation that makes them repeatable.

VMWARE CLOUD FOUNDATION/ HASHICORP VAULT (HA / RAFT)/ NVIDIA vGPU/ NSX · vSAN · ARIA/ PYTHON · ANSIBLE
01 — ABOUT

The person behind the platform

I'm a Senior Platform Engineer focused on greenfield platform engineering — building private-cloud infrastructure and the automation that lets operations teams run it in production.

My work centers on VMware Cloud Foundation and the full hyperconverged stack — vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and VMware Aria — alongside high-availability HashiCorp Vault, NVIDIA vGPU acceleration, and bare-metal provisioning down to the BIOS over Redfish. I like turning fragile, hand-built rollouts into repeatable, verifiable pipelines. I'm a Dare to Lead™ certified engineer who's spent a lot of that time mentoring the people around me.

I've built my whole career at one company, earning my way up through the ranks — from the network operations floor through data modeling, service-delivery development, and carrier lab engineering into platform work. Every promotion came with broader responsibility, and the long view taught me how the whole stack actually fits together.

Away from a terminal, I'm usually studying new trends in computing and new hardware, keeping up with the news, and tinkering — including with firearms and ballistics. The rest of my time goes to a bicycle and two vizslas who treat every ride and every walk like the best idea anyone's ever had.

02 — SELECTED WORK

Things I've built

Platform and infrastructure projects across NightLabs and Lumen.

01
LUMEN

VMware Cloud Foundation Automation

Designed and owned the end-to-end golden-template automation, verification, and delivery pipeline for a VCF private cloud — the tooling operations teams use to run a significant service-provider fleet in production. Worked the full stack: vSphere compute, vSAN storage, NSX networking, and VMware Aria.

VCF 5.x/9.0
vSAN · NSX

Read case study →
02
LUMEN

HashiCorp Vault, Highly Available

Designed and built the team's Vault HA infrastructure — a Raft-consensus cluster behind a load balancer, integrated with Microsoft Entra ID and wired directly into the VCF build pipeline. Authored the internal RFC for the target-state secrets platform after diagnosing an architectural mismatch in the running design.

VAULT · RAFT
ENTRA ID

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03
LUMEN

NVIDIA vGPU on VCF

Delivered NVIDIA vGPU acceleration on VCF 5.2+ for an L40S GPU cluster. Personally automated BIOS provisioning via Redfish plus the ESXi, vSphere, and Aria layers, and served as SME for NVIDIA vGPU Manager lifecycle and compatibility validation.

NVIDIA vGPU
REDFISH · L40S

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04
LUMEN

CI/CD Modernization

Migrated legacy Jenkins pipelines to composable GitHub Actions, regenerating the specialized AWX execution environment on every branch merge. Abstracted PowerShell/VMware-only golden-image generation into a vendor-agnostic framework spanning VMware and Nutanix/QEMU via packer-maas.

GITHUB ACTIONS
AWX · PACKER-MAAS

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05
NIGHTLABS

k8s-diag-agent

An LLM that diagnoses a broken Kubernetes cluster through read-only tools and names the root cause with evidence — read-only by default, human-gated to act, and measured 6/6 against a known-answer eval. A Go tool-calling loop on a real k3s cluster; an exhibit in safe agent engineering on real infrastructure.

GO · client-go
k3s · OTel

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03 — EXPERIENCE

One company, earned my way up the whole stack

Lumen Technologies · Mount Dora, FL

2018 — 2026

Lead Network Engineer

Owned VCF golden-template automation and delivery for a service-provider private cloud; built the team's Vault HA platform, delivered NVIDIA vGPU on VCF, and modernized CI/CD to GitHub Actions.

2016 — 2018

Lead Technical Analyst / Lead Engineer

Productionized an OpenStack-based programmable service backbone. Owned all switching, routing, transport, and test equipment in the carrier emerging-technology lab; SME for SONET-to-OTU/CDC transport and smart NID design.

2012 — 2016

Engineer II / IT Systems Analyst II

Rewrote sequential hardware-stats collection as a concurrent Ruby system — 24+ hours down to ~30 minutes. Modeled physical network hardware into Amdocs ASRI data models and led inventory reconciliation.

2009 — 2012

NSC Technician I / II, Network Operations

Network surveillance, troubleshooting, and service restoration across Frame Relay, ATM, MPLS, and metro Ethernet — then advanced into application development for service delivery and activation.

EDUCATION & CERTS
M.S. Information Security
Nova Southeastern University
B.S. Computer Science
Mountain State University
VMware via Broadcom
VCF 9.0 · NSX 4.x · vSphere 8 — Build, Design & Troubleshoot
Dare to Lead™
Brené Brown Leadership Training
04 — NOW

What I'm into lately

Updated July 2026

Studying new trends in computing and new hardware, keeping up with the news, and tinkering at the bench between rides.

New computing hardware Firearms & ballistics Cycling Two vizslas Following the news
GET IN TOUCH

Let's talk platforms.

Based in Mount Dora, FL. Open to conversations about platform, private-cloud, and infrastructure-automation work.

jpcuckovich@gmail.com  ↗ linkedin.com/in/jpcuckovich  ↗ (321) 441-5163  ↗
© 2026 JOHN CUCKOVICH — SENIOR PLATFORM ENGINEER