Alexander Neville
Software • Systems • Infrastructure Engineer
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 systems at Google and Confluent.
Site Reliability Engineer
Implemented an interactive observability front end to visualise the availability of key ranges and submillisecond latencies in the sharding, rebalancing and tablet server failover behaviour of Bigtable cells by querying internal metadata.
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
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.
Full-stack Software Engineer
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.
I have enjoyed learning about the performance characteristics, trade-offs and implementation details of large-scale distributed 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. I publish some of the photos I take here.