Hey — I’m Chris Stradtman. I’m a network and systems engineer who’s spent the better part of my career working at the intersection of infrastructure, data, and “we need this to work perfectly right now” situations.
I’ve bounced between CDN operations, live event networking, hybrid cloud infrastructure, secure network architecture, and even drone telemetry — which sounds scattered until you realize the common thread is always the same: build something reliable, make it fast, and keep it running when it matters most.
Network Architect at Dispel
Currently, I’m at Dispel, where I work on secure remote access infrastructure for critical industrial environments. It’s a growing company with real momentum, including recent partnerships with organizations like ABB and Mitsubishi Electric, and I’m excited to be part of that trajectory. After years at companies in various stages of growth and upheaval, it’s energizing to be somewhere that’s building something with staying power.
CDN & Data Engineering at Edgio
Most recently I was at Edgio (formerly Limelight Networks), where I worked on the infrastructure behind large-scale content delivery — including Amazon Prime streaming. I managed the team’s Postgres/TimescaleDB server, built Grafana dashboards to track traffic patterns, and developed data pipelines pulling from Airflow, Apache Impala, Kentik, S3, and RIPE APIs.
One of the projects I’m most proud of was building a system that estimated available bandwidth across 1,000+ AS numbers during live Amazon streaming events using Kentik and RIPE data. The goal was to get ahead of congestion before it happened — and it worked well enough that we hit near-zero manual adjustments during live events like the NFL and Copa do Brasil. I was the final escalation point for those mission-critical streams, which kept things interesting.
I also wrote Lua scripts embedded directly in the CDN to reduce undersea traffic and improve latency, and built Jupyter Notebooks for deep-diving into performance issues. If there was data that could make the network smarter, I was probably trying to pipe it into Postgres.
Freelance Network Engineering
I also ran Chris Stradtman LLC, where I did freelance advanced network engineering — mostly for live events and hospitality environments. This meant showing up to a venue, plugging into whatever existing network was there (HP, Aruba, Cisco, Mikrotik, Juniper — you name it), and deploying temporary infrastructure that had to work flawlessly from minute one.
I configured BGP, Spanning Tree, LACP/MLAG, VLANs — all the usual suspects — across multi-vendor environments where nothing was standardized and everything was production. I managed network technicians on-site, coordinated with ISPs (including WISPs and satellite providers), and built out monitoring and alerting so we had real-time visibility throughout the event. Afterward, I put together post-event reports with actionable data on performance, usage patterns, and what to improve next time.
The short version: if you needed a network that absolutely could not go down during a high-density, high-stakes event, that was my thing.
Geospatial & IoT at GeoFrenzy
Before the CDN world, I worked with GeoFrenzy on geospatial technology and geofencing platforms. This was a hybrid cloud environment running Apache CloudStack, oVirt, and Google Cloud (GKE, Compute Engine, load balancers, VPNs, App Engine — the works).
The most unique part of that role was the drone work. I designed and coded ground stations for drone telemetry collection using Python, C, and MQTT, and modified drone firmware in C/C++ to embed tagged parameters in beacon frames for location tracking over ZeroMQ. I also built out ELK stack dashboards to monitor everything from cloud services to ground stations — because if you can’t see it, you can’t fix it.
Oh, and I managed a small fleet of message brokers — ZeroMQ, Celery, ActiveMQ, and RabbitMQ — because apparently one was never enough.
What Ties It All Together
Whether it’s a CDN serving millions of concurrent streams, a temporary event network that has to be bulletproof, or a hybrid cloud running drone telemetry — I like building infrastructure that works under pressure. I’m happiest when I’m somewhere between the network layer and the data layer, figuring out how to make systems talk to each other and surfacing the information that helps people make better decisions.
If any of that resonates, feel free to reach out. I’m always up for a good infrastructure conversation.