01 / ABOUT

Hi, I'm Alex.

I'm a staff software engineer who's spent the past half decade inside the parts of the stack most engineers avoid: billing, payments, and pricing systems that determine what customers actually owe and how they're going to pay.

I didn't set out to specialize in this corner of engineering — I started out building CRUD apps like everyone else. But after landing a role on an international remittance platform, the problems there turned out to be exactly the kind of hard, unglamorous work I wanted to keep doing.

02 / BACKGROUND

My career has followed the money — literally, across international money transfers, restaurant ordering, and password management. The shape of the work has stayed consistent: architecting and delivering scalable payment systems, migrating critical infrastructure without breaking what's running, and building event-driven integrations that reconcile cash flows and reporting.

What keeps me doing this work is the stakes: get a payments system wrong and it's not just bad UX or a missed opportunity, it's a customer's real money. That constraint makes for some of the most interesting distributed-systems problems I've come across — idempotency, reconciliation, and exactly-once semantics in a world where "exactly once" is rarely a reality.

03 / HOW I WORK

→Correctness first — in billing, a fast wrong answer is worse than a slow right one.

→Design for retries and failure from day one — networks drop packets, and your system has to assume they will.

→Translate decisions into systems — pricing and monetization decisions come from leadership; my job is building the system that enforces them correctly, every time.

→Build platforms, not point solutions — a one-off integration that solves today's problem is next year's technical debt; I design for the next consumer before they show up.

→Migrate like rollback is inevitable — dry-run validation and a rollback path aren't optional extras on a migration; they're the actual deliverable.

→Mentorship is part of the job, not overhead — code reviews and technical breakdowns with more junior engineers are deliverables too, not distractions from the real work.

04 / BEYOND BILLING

Outside of work, most of my time goes to Olympic weightlifting — I train five days a week and compete in local meets. Beyond that, I'm usually trying to make the most of Chicago: catching concerts, checking out new restaurants, wandering street festivals, or riding my bike around the city. When I'm not doing any of that, I'm reading history or spending time with friends and family.