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 the Seahawks. I grew up in Washington State, and lived there for thirty-eight years before moving to Texas with my family in 2024.

Career Summary

I graduated from the University of Washington in 2009 with degrees in Economics and Political Science. I intended to go into finance, but that job market was still recovering from the 2008 crash. I needed, you know, money -- so I took a job working as a file clerk at a corporate law firm. I wound up specializing in e-Discovery and setting up legal databases. To help with the tedius data loading work, I taught myself how to write scripts.

It became my favorite part of an otherwise dull and mind-numbing job. And of course, I knew I could earn 3-5x more money as a software dev. More money? A career I could love and grow in? And I was still young and without responsibilities?

I started with some intro CS courses at a local community college. Then I entered a year long graduate certification course at the University of Washington. The CS master's program at the UW will accept that certificate in lieu of a CS degree, so I figured I could convince a hiring manager that it had a similar equivilency. But a cert was only a piece of paper. I also needed the skills. So along the way, I supplemented my course work with extra study and plenty of coding.

That's my advice to anyone wanting to learn to code: A.B.C. -- always be coding. Coffee's for coders, only.

After finishing the program in June 2014, I got an opportunity to work at Amazon as a systems engineer via a referral from a good friend I made at the program. I joined an operations-focused team in Amazon's Seller Central organization. The team's original responsibility was to handle Tier-1 ticket resolution to reduce the ticket load for forty other dev teams. But when I joined, they had been transitioning into building more internal operational tools. This gave me an opportunity to build up my skills as a developer in a low-stakes, low-pressure environement (well, "low" in Amazon standards).

In 2016, I transitioned to an SDE role. I worked at Mechanical Turk for five years working on "Trust & Identity" issues. Our focus was on protecting the platform from bad actors, like criminals attempting to launder money through the platform, or MTurk Workers who abused the platform.

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.