Alex Southwell

01 Open source

02 Experience

1. Aug 2026 – Present

   Algolia

   Senior Site Reliability Engineer, AI Research

   • Led the migration of more than 120 GCP projects to Pulumi, with checks to protect production.
   • Took an AI cost dashboard from a laptop to a secure production service in under a week.
   • Made AI tools easier to use through a shared gateway, secure access and reusable SRE workflows.
   • More than halved model-serving cold-start time in lab tests to guide cloud platform decisions.
   • Made cloud costs visible by service and built a pilot to track deployment lifecycles.
2. July 2024 – June 2026

   Displayr

   Senior DevOps Engineer

   • Built DevOpsBot to automate incident tasks and put service information within easy reach.
   • Made cloud spending easier to manage with automated cost tracking across nearly all Azure resources.
   • Improved build reliability with tools to find unreliable tests and report pipeline quality.
   • Raised engineering standards through mentoring and peer learning; founded a neurodiversity group.
3. Dec 2020 – June 2024

   Amazon Web Services

   Senior Systems Development Engineer in AWS Networking

   • Cut deployment work from hours to minutes and saved hundreds of engineering hours in the first rollout.
   • Built AWS interconnect management tools and a shared library for other engineering teams.
   • Helped a global network team adopt SRE practices and stronger code standards.
   • Built route comparison tools to support the migration of more than a thousand routers.
4. Sept 2019 – Nov 2020

   Canva

   Senior Software/Infrastructure Engineer in Observability

   • Improved production reliability through better monitoring, automated checks and fault diagnosis tools.
   • Applied SRE practices to service availability, performance and capacity planning.
   • Built O11ybot to manage incident response in Slack, where engineers already worked.
   • Rebuilt incident response around clear roles, shared tools and guides for engineers and support.
5. July 2015 – Sept 2019

   ServiceNow

   Senior SRE (2017 onwards) / SRE (2015–17)

   • Kept production services reliable through fault diagnosis, automation and better monitoring.
   • Turned incident lessons into response guides and improvements to service operations.
   • Built SREbot to give teams incident details and on-call contacts during outages.
   • Turned a poorly understood event system into a documented service that teams could maintain.
6. April 2014 – June 2015

   Google

   Network Surveillance Technician

   • Restored network services and resolved faults across global Cisco and Juniper infrastructure.
   • Halved time spent on tickets with a new interface for the global operations team.

03 Technical skills

AI and Development

AI-assisted engineering with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Amp. Multi-agent workflows, task routing, code review, evaluations and automated tests. MCP tools, model gateways and human approval controls. Python, Go, TypeScript, Swift, Bash and PowerShell. REST APIs and developer platforms.

Linux

Ubuntu, CentOS. Azure, AWS and GCP across multiple regions. Private cloud services across global sites.

Databases

MySQL, Azure SQL, DynamoDB, SQLite. Replication, read replicas, sharding and queries across distributed cloud systems.

Observability

Azure Monitor, Application Insights, AWS CloudWatch, Splunk, Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira. Lab work with Grafana and ELK stack.

Networking

SDN, AWS/Azure VNET/VPC, load balancers, firewalls. Global infrastructure networks and secure cloud connections across regions.

Automation and Configuration

Pulumi, Terraform, OpenTofu, CDK, Docker, Kubernetes, Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, Cloud Run and GitHub Actions.

04 Qualifications and earlier roles

• JNCIA-Junos 2019
• TAFE Cert III and IV in IT 2004–2006
• RMIT Bachelor of Technology 2012–On Hold (HD/D)