I’m Alex Mitchell. I live in Seattle, where I help people across the world build for the cloud.

During the summer of 2015, I interned on the Azure team at Microsoft. My primary focus was on building internal CI/CD tooling to streamline deployments for large-scale cloud services. I collaborated closely with senior engineers to:

1. Design and implement automated pipelines using PowerShell and TypeScript.
2. Improve reliability by integrating end-to-end tests into the deployment process.
3. Document best practices and onboard new team members.

This internship solidified my passion for cloud infrastructure and automation, laying the groundwork for my future career in distributed systems.

I've always believed that building scalable systems is more than just writing efficient code—it's a mindset. My time at Google (2017–2020) on the Search Infrastructure team allowed me to put this philosophy into practice.

I worked on several high-impact projects, such as:

1. Ranking Engine Overhaul

   • Refactoring critical ranking algorithms using Go
   • Integrating machine learning models developed in TensorFlow
   • Improving P99 latency significantly—from 1200 ms down to 950 ms

2. Distributed Query Caching

   • Built and optimized a caching layer with Python and Redis
   • Achieved a 50% cache-hit rate at peak traffic

3. Real-Time Analytics Pipeline Developed a streaming analytics tool for monitoring search latency:

   logs
     .filter(log => log.latency > 1000)
     .forEach(alert => sendAlert(alert))
   
   

Key results of my contributions:

In addition to technical contributions, I mentored 5 interns, organized weekly tech talks, and actively contributed to open-source projects like OpenTelemetry and gRPC.

Here's a quick example of deploying one of our internal services:

kubectl apply -f google-search-deployment.yaml

I also shared my experience through public speaking and writing:

• GopherCon 2018: “Building Scalable Search Systems”
• Google Official Blog: “Distributed Tracing at Scale”

Scalability is a mindset, not just a technology.