About Alex

I’m a seasoned software engineer whose focus over the last decade has been integration of open source software components to deliver world class application runtimes.

Experience and Results

Member of the Technical Staff

Tigris Data, Remote in USA - April 2025 - Present

• Doing whatever needs done to build the next generation in internet storage at Tigris Data.

Principal Engineer

Equinix, Remote in USA - June 2024 - April 2025

• At Equinix Metal I modernized their PostgreSQL deployment by automating the environment with Ansible, completing a low-downtime upgrade using Logical Replication from PostgreSQL 12 to 16 and deploying Patroni for automated fail over.At Equinix Metal I modernized their PostgreSQL deployment by automating the environment with Ansible, completing a low-downtime upgrade using Logical Replication from PostgreSQL 12 to 16 and deploying Patroni for automated fail over.

Staff Production Engineer

Shopify, Remote in USA - December 2020 - May 2024

• Built out Shopfiy’s large-scale, cloud ScyllaDB environment in GCP using Terraform and Kubernetes to serve over 110 million events daily
• Developed and maintained a patchset that added multiple region support to the open source ScyllaDB Kubernetes Operator and Medusa backup program for ScyllaDB
• Worked with multiple teams across the organization to design, deploy, and commission the ScyllaDB clusters
• Benchmarked and tuned MySQL and Linux installations to resolve critical query performance problems using tools such as linux perf, flamegraphs and techniques such as USE
• Designed and implemented Prometheus exporter in Go to capture MySQL database KPI Metrics improving system heath signals for workload throughput

Senior Production Engineer

Shopify, Remote in USA - December 2017 - November 2020

• Redesigned the existing high-availability MySQL on VM setup to run on Docker and Kubernetes with custom Kubernetes Operator to support thousands of MySQL instances
• Project champion for numerous key initiatives such as moving MySQL from VMs to Kubernetes and region load testing
• Responsible for the availability, performance and on-call incident response for Shopfy’s petabyte scale core MySQL deployment

OpenStack Private Cloud Technical Architect

John Deere, Moline IL - July 2015 to November 2017

• Leading a team and being a core technical contributor designing, implementing, supporting and marketing an IaaS private cloud based on OpenStack for Internal IT consumption
• Technical Leadership using new tooling and automation (Python, Ansible, Puppet, Jenkins) to deploy and manage a complex scale out application stack (OpenStack, Neutron/OVS SDN, Ceph, RabbitMQ, MariaDB Galera) with a small team
• Expert in Linux Networking: knows OpenStack Neutron design and deployment using VXLAN overlay networks with both Open vSwitch OpenFlow, and Linux Bridges. Understands TCP Routing in OpenStack using Linux Network Name Spaces with complex L3 topologies
• Communication and outreach to the John Deere Java developer community on how to automate application deployment into the OpenStack Cloud
• Cutting through red tape in a complex and bureaucratic enterprise to deliver an infrastructure solution that reduced service delivery times from days to seconds and slashed cost by 50%. Received Division Level Recognition

Lead DevOps Engineer

John Deere, Moline IL - May 2012 – July 2015

• Increased Team Productivity and Skills by implementing DevOps processes such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Configuration Management, Pair Programming, Empathy and Improved Cross Functional Team Work. This resulted in increased Sysadmin team performance leading to successful cost reduction projects of over $1 million over the next 18 Months.
• Architecture and implementation of HPC Clusters supporting product engineering consisting of over 600 Linux compute nodes in six locations spread across three countries using infiniband and zfs storage

System Administrator

John Deere, Moline IL - February 2006 – May 2012

• Member of a globaly distributed Team providing 24x7x365 cross platform support for a large install base of over 3000 Solaris, Linux (Redhat), AIX, VMware and Windows Servers
• Architecture and implementation of Solaris Containers utilizing ZFS zonepaths and root zpools realizing over $300,000 in annual expense reduction.

DataCenter Operator

John Deere, Moline IL - November 2003 - January 2006

• Troubleshooting and escalations of problems involving LAN, WAN, Mainframe Operations and Distributed Servers in John Deere’s global operations
• Authored a LAMP application that replaced a paper sign in process for Datacenter access tracking that was in use until 2014.

Skills

Operating Systems/Deployment/Configuration Management: Linux, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Terraform, Packer, Docker, Systems Performance

Networking & Network Services: TCP/IP, DNS, NTP, Routing, VLANS, Infiniband, SAN, SDN, VXLAN, Overlay Networking, VPC, Open-vSwitch/OVS, OpenFlow

Cloud: GCP, Kubernetes, AWS, OpenStack

Database: MySQL, Scylla, Cassandra, Redis

Programming: Go, Ruby, SQL, Puppet, Ansible, Chef, Perl, Bash, Git, Python, Java (long ago), C++ (long ago)

Process: Agile, Kanban, Continuous Improvement, CI/CD, DevOps, Google SRE

Personality: Curious, Interested, Honest, Thoughtful, Engaged, Leadership, Self Starter

Education

Bachelor of Arts Augustana College, Rock Island IL

Graduated Magna Cume Laude

Awarded Donald E. McLaughlin Award for Achievement and Excellence in Computer Science (2003)

Majors: Computer Science and Mathematics.

Hobbies and Interests

• Sailboating - I am the Director of the Quad City Sailing School
• I’m an officer in the local Linux Users Group QCLUG