Hi, my name is

Alex Lin

Infrastructure & Platform Engineer

San Francisco, CA · Canadian citizen (TN visa eligible)

I build and operate highly available, multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP. 4+ years owning platform subsystems end-to-end - service-mesh networking, secrets, PKI, and observability - on a deep Linux systems and Go foundation.

01Experience

Software Engineer, Core Platform Infrastructure

Alkira Inc.

  • Own multiple core platform subsystems end-to-end (secrets, service-mesh proxy, PKI, datastore) and drive production rollouts across 5 environments and 4 clouds.
  • Led deprecation of the per-node AWS NLBs and Route53 records fronting 270+ production nodes, replacing them with a custom Envoy egress proxy that load-balances directly to gateway-node public IPs via Etcd, cutting recurring networking cost by thousands of dollars per month.
  • Designed and shipped a phased mutual-TLS service mesh in which nodes publish services to Etcd as Protobuf and gateway Envoys build per-node filter chains and client mTLS routes, securing intra-cluster traffic and Prometheus metric scraping.
  • Sole author of the global Vault secrets platform: per-environment certificate-auth roles bound to step-ca node certs, a Vault agent baked into node images, and a DR-capable multi-node cluster for secret storage and transit encryption.
  • Extended the platform into the network-isolated AWS and Azure China partitions, injecting cross-partition S3/Route53 credentials into provisioning, log/stat shippers, and Helm charts as Kubernetes secrets; oversaw ICP licensing with the local partner.
  • Maintain the multi-cloud machine-image build system (Packer and QEMU across AWS, Azure, and GCP) producing layered Debian images running the VPP, FRR, StrongSwan, and OpenVPN dataplane stack.
  • Ran production on-call and Kubernetes/EKS lifecycle operations: staged control-plane upgrades with zero tunnel-health impact, Temporal upgrades, and goroutine/memory-leak debugging with Go Delve and pprof.

OS Security Developer & Test Intern

BlackBerry (QNX)

  • Built a C/Python unit-test suite for QNX's strace covering libc POSIX system calls (message passing, IO, forking, threading), added multithreaded trace-to-file output, and debugged memory bugs with GDB while cross-compiling the microkernel RTOS via GCC/Make/QEMU.

Cyber Analyst & Full-Stack Developer Intern

Deloitte

  • Built a full-stack internal web app (Flask, VueJS, PostgreSQL) to track incident-response engagements, and supported breach remediation (malware/ransomware) with log parsing, PII gathering, and patient-zero investigation.

OS Security Developer & Test Intern

BlackBerry (QNX)

  • Ported a legacy internal test framework to Pytest for QNX's kernel-level Mandatory Access Control feature, and maintained nightly Jenkins regression runs (Bash/Python/SSH) with cron-driven rsync backups.

University of Toronto

HBSc - Major in Mathematics, Double Minor in Computer Science & Statistics

02Projects

Deerhunt Infrastructure

Full-stack platform built with UTM Robotics for hosting automated AI competitions: a Flask API, React frontend, and match-running backend. Core open-source contributor; helped deploy the club's Battlecode event.

  • Python
  • Flask
  • React
  • Docker

EvtxReader

Pure-Python parser for Windows Event Log (.evtx) files, written from the format specification with zero runtime dependencies. Covers the full format - CRC32-validated chunks, binary XML payloads, templates - rendering records as Event Viewer XML or JSON, validated record-for-record against the reference Rust parser.

  • Python
  • DFIR
  • Binary formats

Self-Hosted Infrastructure

Three-site homelab managed as code: Ansible playbooks and Docker Compose across a home server, a Raspberry Pi, and cloud VPS instances, with Terraform-managed cloud provisioning. Runs a WireGuard VPN mesh, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden secrets management, and a Grafana/Prometheus monitoring stack.

  • Ansible
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • WireGuard
  • Nginx

dotfiles

My Arch Linux desktop environment as code: Hyprland and i3 window manager setups, waybar/polybar, and a Lua-based Neovim configuration with treesitter.

  • Linux
  • Neovim
  • Lua
  • Hyprland

p5 Animations

Creative coding sketches built with the p5.js (Processing) framework - a long-running outlet for generative art and math visualization. Watch them live.

  • JavaScript
  • p5.js

03Skills

Cloud & IaC

AWS (EC2, EKS, ECR, S3, VPC, Route53, NLB/ELB), Azure, GCP; Terraform, Ansible, Packer

Systems & Kernel

POSIX system calls, IPC/message passing, threading & concurrency; QNX microkernel architecture, kernel-level Mandatory Access Control; Linux internals (systemd, cgroups, eBPF); GDB, Go Delve, pprof; cross-compilation via GCC/Make/QEMU

Orchestration & CD

Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Concourse, Docker & Docker Compose

Observability

Prometheus, Grafana, k6, Alertmanager, Blackbox exporter, OpenTelemetry

Data & Secrets

Etcd, HashiCorp Vault, Temporal, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, NATS

Networking & Security

Envoy (xDS), FRR/BGP, VPP, IPSec/StrongSwan, VXLAN, mTLS, step-ca PKI, gRPC/Protobuf

Languages

Go, C, Python, Bash, JavaScript/Node; familiar with C++, Rust