Alex Swehla

Systems Engineer specializing in infrastructure architecture, automation, management, and distributed systems design and implementation.

Experience

Patreon - Site Reliability Engineer (2018-2019)

  • Characterized and resolved database/site performance issues.
  • Assisted expansion from single region AWS architecture to multi-region.
  • Built Terraform automation for provisioning AWS EKS.
  • Guided notification system architecture refresh to increase reliability and reduce complexity using dynamodb and AWS lambda.
  • Automated image builds using packer and circle-ci.
  • Updated CI/CD platform to use ECR for build docker images.

Capella Space Corp - Ground Software and Infrastructure Engineer (2017-2018)

  • Automated generation of encode/decode logic for command and telemetry packets at run time.
  • Created metadata and audit tracking system for all spacecraft subsystems and software versions.
  • Packaged the ground software stack in containers (Docker).
  • Automated deployment and management (Kubernetes, Docker-compose).
  • Automated storage and retrieval of spacecraft telemetry and commands for auditing and analysis.
  • Provided embedded Linux support for custom GPU module bring-up and characterization of PCI-Express subsystems.

Twitch.tv - Systems Engineer (2016-2017)

  • Maintained internal systems infrastructure and services supporting all other teams within Twitch.
  • Served as main support contact between the systems engineering team and infosec team.
  • Integrated numerous services with Consul cluster for configuration and service discovery.
  • Optimized core puppet code base to decrease convergence and run times.
  • Migrated Puppet stack from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4.

Palantir Technologies - Site Reliability Engineer (2012-2016)

  • Implemented and architected core infrastructure for customer deployments in Azure.
  • Developed tools to aid in autonomous and highly available deployment and monitoring of internal systems.
  • Maintained and architected cloud infrastructure in AWS for customer deployments.
  • Designed automated provisioning system for bare metal hardware reducing delivery time from 2 days to 2 hours.
  • Provided technical expertise on remote customer sites to resolve critical situations quickly.
  • Established updated development work flows and source control standards for the Mission Operations team.

Technical Experience

Projects

Certographer github.com/lordspacehog/certographer

A certificate authority written in golang. Designed to help with automated creation of certificate authorities and management of certificate issuing/revocation.

Correly github.com/lordspacehog/correly

A simple MQTT server that pushes data directly to TimescaleDB.

Languages

Python: Advanced

  • Deep knowledge of the inner workings of the Python import system.
  • Use of multithreading/multiprocessing for handling parallelism and concurrency.
  • Use of Asyncio futures.
  • Performance characterization and optimization.
  • Customizing the operation of the JSON parser/encoder for extra functionality.
  • Using context managers and generators for efficiently handling large data sets.

Bash: Advanced

  • Writing scripts to automatically detect platform and include the appropriate configuration and applications needed.
  • Inline string manipulation for filtering data from stdin.

Golang: Intermediate

  • Service to service authentication and tunneling using SSH.
  • Certificate generation and management.

Basic knowledge of C/C++, Ruby, Perl, Java

Interests

Electronics
LED lighting for art cars, automated brewing setups, MIDI controllers, tube amplifiers, IoT sensors.
Amateur Radio
Designing, building, and using radios on amateur frequencies. Currently licensed to general class. Call sign KK6PGH.
Music
DJing, producing electronic music, and discovering new artists/genres.