# Alex Kardos > Technology Enthusiast | Focused on Collaborative Innovation and Creative Business Solutions Location: Denver, Colorado, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/alexkardos As a seasoned engineering leader, I thrive on building and guiding high-performing, collaborative teams focused on data and revenue. Driven by a passion for diverse challenges and staying current with emerging technologies, I have a track record of sparking innovation and achieving tangible results. I am committed to enhancing performance and fostering a culture of continuous growth and progress. ## Work Experience ### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Zscaler Jan 2024 – Present ### Team Lead - Senior Software Engineer @ Cisco Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 ### Team Lead - Senior Site Reliability Engineer and Software Engineer @ Splunk Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Jose, California, United States I built and guided a team through a challenging cross-organizational initiative, successfully defining the parameters of control plane health. This contribution not only solved the complexity of health but also laid the foundation for more efficient and effective control plane operations. * Developed and maintained a Golang Kubernetes service that defines health for Splunk Cloud control plane operations * Designed a cross-organizational health service for Splunk’s Observability platform making SignalFx/Prometheus/Logs health data highly actionable by automated processes * Made our observability ingestion platform directly actionable for automated health purposes * Built a health check that removed 91% of manual touchpoints for all new automatically delivered Splunk stacks * Designed an upgrade health check that saved 30k engineering hours per year * Engineered health checks enabling Splunk to expand into GCP acquiring over 200 net new customers * Designed and enforced SRE best practices for uptime and alerting within our team * Ran the hiring working group and enabled 120+ interviews and 21+ hires * Hired and built a highly productive team with a growth oriented engineering culture * Designed internal on-call, Scrum, and culture documents and encouraged regular refinement as a team ### Team Lead - Senior Data Engineer @ VictorOps Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Boulder, Colorado, United States I lead a team of data engineers to rewrite our legacy systems and expand VictorOps reporting data capabilities * Reliably delivered critical reporting data in a secure and low latency pipeline utilizing S3, Lambda, and Kinesis * Built out visibility and alerting utilizing Prometheus/Grafana for our internal tooling * Built out infrastructure as code utilizing Terraform to enable repeatable pipelining solutions * Optimized performance of Postgres and MySQL databases and data reliant processes * Worked within our Scala backend to provide performant and accurate reporting data * Designed a process for complete deletion of historical VictorOps reporting data to ensure compliance. * Designed and enforced JSON Schema contracts that improve reporting data ingest reliability from our application data * Diagrammed and documented architecture to improve our understanding of our data platform * Regularly mentored and guided engineers in best practices ### Senior Software and Data Engineer @ Kapost Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Boulder Colorado I worked with data scientists to deliver, optimize, and train machine learning models * Created and optimized pipelines for our machine learning platforms * Led architecture for all greenfield Spark EMR applications * Designed a FastAPI Python back-end to facilitate the utilization of our ML models and responses * Integrated our ML back-end with our React/Redux front-end applications * Engineered multi-environment pipeline CI/CD * Built ML visualizations using plotly * Generated sample visualizations to allow customers to understand our solutions * Exported data from non-standard sources in order to quickly iterate on solutions * Mentored junior developers on best practices and problem solving techniques ### Software Engineer @ RedCanary Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Denver, Colorado, United States I delivered features reliably and quickly, in a mission critical security environment that securely processes large amounts of data. * Rapidly and reliably delivered new features to our EDR web platform * Optimized and improved our high throughput Sidekiq data processing workers * Helped develop and manage a Kubernetes pipeline which consumes over 1 terabyte of data a day * Orchestrated a book club on the Google SRE book * Delivered clean front-end development using CoffeeScript, jQuery, and Bootstrap * Provided fixes and maintenance to the Carbon Black event forwarder in GoLang * Made changes to our AWS infrastructure using Terraform ### Software Developer @ Pinnacol Assurance Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 Driving innovation, quality, and engineering maintainable systems to replace legacy solutions.Implemented AngularJS/Angular front-ends and Rails backend API’s * Implemented AngularJS/Angular front-ends and Rails backend API’s * I was the go-to developer of Pinnacol’s application RBAC and Auth platform * Designed security standards from within the software security team * Trained in Rails OWASP security penetration techniques * Started a technological book club for constant improvement among the developers * Integrated front-end and back-end testing to have a complete test suite * Advocated clean, readable, well-tested code ### CTO @ Cannabase Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 I co-founded a company as CTO, lead the technical departments, and spearheaded the technical direction of the company. * Created real-time pub/sub messaging environments * Handled PCI compliance requirements * Managed cloud-based services and databases through Amazon EC2 * Integrated geospatial PostGIS data with Rails applications * Managed environmental complexity through Capistrano, Puppet recipes, and TDD * Architected and administered all systems and business solutions * Mentored junior engineers * Advised the business in regards to technology, direction, and decisions ### Software Developer @ Orange Collar Media Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Greater Denver Area Importing and cleaning data from a variety of E-Commerce platforms into a high quality and clean Magento environment. * Cleaned and imported highly inconsistent customer data into Magento EAV databases * Designed an import process to efficiently import the world’s largest Magento catalog * Developed tools to assist with transforming and loading data * Mentored other developers on Magento importing techniques and best practices ### Web Application Developer @ Balloon Innovations Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 Contracted to engineer an X-Cart E-Commerce solution, manage security, operations, and maintain PCI compliance. ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alex-kardos --- Source: https://flows.cv/alexkardos JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alexkardos/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22