Alex Ellis
Senior Software Engineer at Netflix
Greater Boston United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Ellis is a senior software engineer with a decade of experience building high-scale, cloud-native networking systems, currently shaping Netflix’s Cloud Gateway to reliably route billions of user requests. He previously contributed to Google’s next-generation reverse proxies and an Envoy-based load balancer, and is an active open-source contributor to Envoy—implementing OpenTelemetry trace propagation and span exporting to improve observability across distributed systems. With an MS in Computer Science from Tufts and a multidisciplinary BA, he blends deep systems and networking expertise with product-focused polish from consumer-facing teams. Beyond code, he writes publicly about engineering and enjoys balancing production reliability work with walks in Greater Boston with his dog.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Tufts UniversityBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Physics French Political Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Physics French Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis
French
Github Skills (9)
distributed-tracing10
opentelemetry10
go10
envoyproxy10
trace10
tracer10
grpc10
test-automation9
cloud-native9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
envoyproxy/envoy
Jun 2022 - Aug 2022
Cloud-native high-performance edge/middle/service proxy
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 reviews, 8 commits, 9 PRs in 2 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to the OpenTelemetry (OTEL) integration within Envoy, focusing on trace propagation and exporting spans to an OTEL backend. They implemented features like setting attributes on spans, including a service name, and propagating the tracestate header. Their work included adding tests, fixing existing test entries, and improving the overall functionality of the OTEL tracer within the Envoy proxy.
nanoservicesmore-catsgolangcontainersproxy
AlexanderEllis/blog
Aug 2017 - Nov 2022
Contributions:1 review, 220 commits, 2 PRs in 5 years 4 months
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