Alexander Neville

Software / Systems / Infrastructure Engineer

Hello, my name is Alexander. I am an undergraduate computer science student at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. I have contributed to the design, development and operation of cloud-scale, high-performance distributed data systems at Google and Confluent.

Experience

Here is an overview of my recent startup and internship roles. Some details have been omitted; I would be happy to provide a full copy of my CV upon request.

Site Reliability Engineer

Google · Internship · On-site · Dublin, Ireland
June 2025 - September 2025

Implemented an interactive observability front end to visualise the availability of key ranges and microsecond-accurate latencies in the sharding, rebalancing and tablet server failover behaviour of Bigtable cells by querying internal metadata.

C++ ·Bigtable ·Protobuf ·RPC ·FFI ·TypeScript ·Angular ·RxJS ·D3

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Confluent · Internship · Remote · United Kingdom
June 2024 - June 2025

Contributed to the specification and implementation of custom resources and controllers to declaratively manage infrastructure by reconciling intent with cloud provider APIs. Monitored and operated the production Kubernetes fleet.

Go ·Kubernetes ·Protobuf ·gRPC ·Prometheus ·AWS ·GCP ·Azure ·Terraform

Full-stack Software Engineer

cuby · Freelance · Remote · United Kingdom
March 2024 - August 2024

Created rich user interfaces backed by a federated GraphQL supergraph resolving queries over more than 20 subgraph microservices. Developed scripts and tooling to streamline development, testing and business operations.

Kotlin ·GraphQL ·Spring ·DynamoDB ·TypeScript ·React

About Me

I have enjoyed learning about the performance characteristics, trade-offs and implementation details of large-scale distributed data systems like Confluent Cloud (Kafka), Bigtable and Colossus (Google's distributed file system).

I'm looking into Unix APIs, Linux ABIs, pseudo file systems, standard libraries, compiler toolchains, language runtimes etc. as part of an ongoing effort to understand a machine and its operating system at the byte level.

I am very enthusiastic about my Arch Linux, Sway, Neovim, tmux setup - you can find the configuration files here. My blog/documentation website, an older project, can be read here.