About

Justin Larsen is Head of Technology at Traeger Grills, a publicly traded consumer brand, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is the company's senior-most technology role. He leads a 32-person technology team spanning Software Engineering, Business Systems (ERP, CRM, data warehouse, integrations), and Infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes), and owns an eight-figure annual technology operating budget.

He has twenty years of experience across networking, data engineering, machine learning, and engineering leadership. Earlier in his career, he optimized a 500-billion-row SQL Server monolith at Ancestry, built serverless eventing systems, managed Spark and Hadoop clusters for fintech companies, and built a machine learning system for standardizing veterinary medication names.

AI at Traeger

Justin runs an all-agentic engineering organization: every part of software development at Traeger is driven by AI agents across more than 30 technology stacks. He rolled AI out across the entire enterprise, deploying Claude to 230 users with 80% monthly engagement. An internal plugin marketplace delivers role-specific skills and connectors across the organization.

He built a remote data-warehouse MCP server, secured with OAuth over Active Directory, that lets the entire business query cooks, sales, and shipments in natural language. His agent security model runs every custom tool as the individual user, ensuring that all agent actions carry that person's real identity and permissions.

Selected results

At Traeger, Justin consolidated 50 AWS accounts into a single governed organization and migrated 400+ microservices into four domain-bounded monoliths. He raised the mobile app rating from 2.4 to 4.8 stars in six months, cut per-device cloud costs by 50% across a connected-grill fleet of hundreds of thousands of devices, and delivered an 8x improvement in API response time. Since 2021, he roughly halved an eight-figure annual technology operating budget while increasing delivery throughput.

Justin speaks publicly on AI in software engineering and cloud or IoT modernization, including AWS re:Invent 2023 session CPG205. He is a member of the ACM.

About this site

justin.larsen.dev is Justin's personal website. It is not a commercial business and sells no products or services. It holds his career story, resume, talks, a photo feed, and side projects. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Traeger Grills.