$ whoami
Alex Rivera
$ cat role.txt
Software Engineer · Brooklyn, NY
I build reliable systems, developer tools, and the occasional side project that gets out of hand.
About
Software engineer focused on backend infrastructure, developer experience, and the boring reliability work that keeps products alive. I like small tools, sharp abstractions, and shipping things that other engineers actually enjoy using.
Experience
- 2022 — Present
Senior Software Engineer @ Northwind Systems
Lead infrastructure for the platform team. Cut deploy times by 70% and owned the migration to a multi-region database.
- 2019 — 2022
Software Engineer @ Beacon Labs
Built and scaled the billing and metering pipeline handling millions of events per day.
- 2017 — 2019
Full-stack Developer @ Freelance
Shipped web apps and APIs for early-stage startups across fintech and logistics.
Selected Work
Pipeline
A type-safe job queue for TypeScript with backpressure, retries, and a live dashboard. Powers background work for a handful of production apps.
- TypeScript
- Redis
- Node
Ledger
Double-entry accounting engine exposed over a small, well-documented HTTP API. Built to be correct first, fast second.
- Go
- Postgres
- gRPC
dotfiles
My terminal, editor, and shell configuration — reproducible across machines with a single bootstrap script.
- Shell
- Nix
- Neovim
Signal
A tiny observability library that turns structured logs into metrics without a separate agent. Weekend project turned dependency.
- Rust
- OpenTelemetry
Writing
- 5 min
Boring Technology Is a Feature
Why I reach for the well-understood tool before the exciting one, and how that has saved me more weekends than any framework ever has.
- 7 min
Reading Code You Did Not Write
A practical process for getting productive in an unfamiliar codebase without reading every line.
- 4 min
The Cost of a Good Error Message
Good error messages are expensive to write and cheap to ignore. Here is why they are worth the trade.