Alex Hess

Every Snowflake region runs on cloud infrastructure that has to be created, changed and checked continuously. I designed and built the workflow automation platform that does this. It became the default way teams across the company automate infrastructure, and I’m the technical lead for the group of about thirteen engineers who build it.

• A platform other teams own. Teams such as networking, container services and product security write and merge their own automation modules on it, without waiting for central review.
• Faster, steadier releases. Cut downtime between platform updates from 10 minutes to 10 seconds, cut standby memory use by 75%, and made the UI about 1,000× faster with a module cache.
• Typed metadata instead of YAML. Co-designed a metadata service that replaced hand-edited YAML files as the source of truth for deployment data and feature flags.
• AI agents for infrastructure. Built the first prototype of an agent that writes and validates infrastructure changes, a harness that backtests it against work already done, and a knowledge base whose articles are checked claim by claim against their sources.

LiveTechnology ran on software I wrote. Instead of Jira, Google Docs or Confluence, every employee used an in-house suite: project and time tracking, document management, bug tracking with screenshot markup, a client for the company’s object-based database, and a data-driven template engine that generated print and digital ads at every size a client needed. I reported directly to the CEO.

• BitCine Technologies. When film festivals moved online during COVID, I built their streaming apps for Android TV, Fire TV (Kotlin) and Samsung Tizen (HTML5/JavaScript), with branded builds for four festivals including Milwaukee Film and Tallgrass Film.
• Raven Systems. Rewrote the controller for a planetarium-dome lighting system from C++/OpenGL to C#, with a clearer UI, import of existing customer projects, and fixture control over Art-Net.