Alec Holmes
Senior Principal Software Engineer at Palo Alto Networks
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlec Holmes is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 11+ years building scalable, distributed systems for data-heavy and calculation-intensive domains, now based in San Francisco. He blends hands-on expertise in Go, Java, and Kotlin with deep experience in C++, Scala, and Ruby to design robust architectures and shipping production-ready services. Alec has driven platform and payments infrastructure at Square and helped scale observability systems at Chronosphere before joining Palo Alto Networks, demonstrating a track record of solving high-throughput, reliability-critical problems. He contributes to open-source backend tooling—most notably enhancements to Cash App’s misk microservice framework around testing, SQS integration, and client/HTTP stack improvements. Comfortable leading cross-functional teams, he pairs technical leadership with process and mentorship to turn complex requirements into pragmatic solutions. Outside core work, his background in both computer science and music hints at a systems-oriented creativity that informs his engineering approach.
11 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science Music, BA Computer Science Music at New York University
Github Skills (7)
kotlin10
javas10
microservices-application10
microservices10
java10
okhttp9
retrofit9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
cashapp/misk
Feb 2019 - Jun 2020
Microservice Kontainer
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:30 commits, 39 PRs, 47 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Alec contributed to the core backend functionality of the `misk` repository, focusing on improvements to testing infrastructure, AWS integration with SQS, and client management. The user added features for testing modules, implemented exception handling and queue metadata for SQS jobs, and introduced clients for cluster communication. They also enhanced the codebase with the ability to use Retrofit converters and customize OkHttp dispatcher settings.
dockermicroservicemicroservices
alecholmes/alecholmes.github.io
Feb 2015 - Aug 2023
Contributions:39 pushes, 1 branch in 8 years 8 months
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