About

Hi there, my name is Alex Graham, and I enjoy solving problems with software. I currently work at Cloudflare in Austin, TX.

Outside developing software, I enjoy spending time with my family and dog, reading various books, working out in my garage, and watching football.

Bio

After graduating from college in 2009 with an Econ degree, I took a job working as a file clerk at a corporate law firm in Seattle. I worked on handling e-Discovery and setting up legal databases. To help with tedius data loading work, I taught myself how to run basic scripts. It became my favorite part of the job, so I decided to switch careers.

I took some community college intro to comp sci courses, and then a yearlong graduate certification course at the University of Washington, and supplemented with extra reading and projects. I finished in mid-2014, and got an amazing opportunity to work at Amazon as a systems engineer focused on Tier-1 ticket resolution and internal operational tooling.

In 2016, I transitioned to an SDE role. I worked at Mechanical Turk for five years.

Fun Fact

MTurk was one of the original AWS services -- it was launched four months before S3, which means it is technically the first AWS product! But maybe not the most well-known...

In 2021, I switched to working in the AWS EMR organization in their Spark performance team. I focused primarily on building performance tooling, which could manage multiple EMR clusters, run TPC-DS benchmarks, process massive telemetry JSON files, and produce a performance report analyzing the results.

Since 2024, I have been working at Cloudflare working on storage solutions. I helped build Cloudflare Vectorize.