About me
Hi, I'm Alex Mercer.
I’m a Principal Cloud & Platform Architect with over a decade of experience designing resilient distributed systems, multi-region edge delivery networks, and declarative infrastructure-as-code workflows.
My engineering philosophy centers on simplicity, observability, and removing moving parts at runtime. Whether architecting global storage replication with AWS S3 Multi-Region Access Points or building zero-SSR static web applications, I prefer systems whose failure modes are predictable and whose deployments are fully reproducible from version control.
Outside the terminal, I spend my time photographing minimalist architecture, coastal geometry, and alpine landscapes.
Languages
- English
- Native
- SpanishEspañol
- Fluent
- Japanese日本語
- Conversational
Career Journey
Work Experience
Over a decade scaling mission-critical email security platforms, enterprise hardware, and reliable cloud infrastructure.
Principal Cloud & Platform Architect
- Architected active-active multi-region AWS edge platforms utilizing S3 Multi-Region Access Points (MRAP), CloudFront SigV4a Origin Access Control, and Global Accelerator.
- Standardized organization-wide Terraform modules and GitLab CI/CD pipelines with native S3 state locking, cutting deployment lead times by 68%.
- Led reliability engineering reviews, SLO error-budget governance, and automated chaos testing across 14 global points of presence.
Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Progression: Senior SRE → Staff Site Reliability Engineer
- Designed high-throughput observability pipelines and zero-downtime release automation supporting 40,000+ requests per second at the edge.
- Engineered automated TLS/ACM certificate lifecycle tooling, DNSSEC validation, and strict IAM least-privilege boundaries across production AWS accounts.
- Authored internal developer documentation and static architecture portals built with Astro and Tailwind CSS.
Senior Systems & Virtualization Engineer
- Managed hybrid bare-metal Linux clusters, Proxmox VE hypervisors, and ZFS storage pools with PCIe HBA passthrough for low-latency workloads.
- Automated bare-metal provisioning, BGP Anycast routing policies, and hardware health telemetry across three regional facilities.
Recommendations
Kind words from colleagues
“Alex is the kind of principal engineer every infrastructure organization hopes to find. From SigV4a multi-region storage routing to zero-SSR static edge delivery, every system Alex designs is fast, observable, and rock-solid.”
“Clear communicator, methodical debugger, and relentless automator. Alex turned our manual cloud provisioning into a reproducible, self-documenting GitLab CI/CD pipeline in a matter of weeks.”
“Working alongside Alex over the past three years transformed how our platform group approaches multi-region resilience and infrastructure automation. Alex has a rare ability to take deeply complex distributed systems problems and distil them into clean, maintainable Terraform and CI/CD workflows.
Whenever a critical architectural decision or cross-region latency bottleneck surfaced, Alex combined rigorous first-principles diagnostics with pragmatic execution—delivering production-grade solutions without unnecessary complexity.
Beyond technical depth, Alex is a generous mentor who elevates the engineering bar for everyone on the team.”
“An exceptional systems architect who pairs deep Linux and networking fundamentals with modern cloud-native patterns.”
“Alex brings clarity, calm, and deep technical mastery to every architecture review and production incident.”
“Collaborating with Alex on our global edge migration was a highlight of my career. The documentation, diagrams, and Terraform modules Alex authored remain the gold standard across our engineering org.”
“Thoughtful, proactive, and detail-oriented—Alex consistently bridges the gap between low-level infrastructure reliability and polished developer experience.”
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about this starter theme, architecture, and deployment stack.
Theme & Customization
How to adapt this starter template for your own site.
Where do I configure my name, domain, avatar, and social links?
All personal and site identity settings live in src/site.config.ts, while UI mechanics (SVG wordmark, navigation links, pagination, tooltips, Formspree, and Umami) live in src/theme.config.ts. See Part 1 — Customizing This Astro Theme for a complete walkthrough.
How does the Living CV tag taxonomy work?
Shared tags connect four collections—Career Experience (src/data/experiences.ts), Technical Articles (src/content/blog/), Operational Logs (src/content/log/), and Photography (src/content/photography/)—into unified topic archive pages under /tags/.
Infrastructure & Delivery
Static compilation and multi-region AWS replication.
How is this website built and hosted?
The site compiles to 100% static HTML, CSS, and WebP assets using Astro 7.4 and Tailwind CSS v4. Build artifacts can be deployed to any static host, or provisioned across regional AWS S3 buckets behind an S3 Multi-Region Access Point (MRAP) and CloudFront SigV4a Origin Access Control using the included Terraform stack.
Contact
Get in touch
Have a question about cloud architecture, distributed reliability, or this starter theme? Send a message below.