Alex Finkel
Staff Software Engineer at Stile Education
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlex Finkel is a Staff Software Engineer and seasoned engineering leader based in Melbourne with 12 years of experience building reliable, data-driven platforms for education and research. He has progressed from hands-on SRE and bioinformatics work—contributing to the STAR RNA-seq aligner and publishing research tools—to leading platform and product engineering at Stile Education, where he rebuilt team structures, SRE practices, and analytics capabilities for scaling into the US market. Alex combines practical engineering (frequently shipping critical bug fixes and prototypes) with managerial discipline, creating hiring and performance rubrics, training engineers into managers, and formalizing on-call and SLO processes. He brings a pragmatist’s philosophy—favoring evidence, simplicity, and systems that fail within their tolerances—and a preference for making one thing do its job well rather than stretching responsibilities. His academic background spans an M.Sc. in Computer Science and an MBA, giving him both technical depth and strategic business perspective. Outside product work he’s comfortable improving low-level code quality and build processes, as shown by refactors to core bioinformatics tooling.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of Melbourne
Github Skills (6)
header-files10
c-language10
build-process10
cprogramming-language10
rna-seq9
htslib7
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
alexdobin/STAR
Jun 2015 - Aug 2015
RNA-seq aligner
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 4 PRs, 3 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on improving the code structure and dependencies of the STAR RNA-seq aligner. Their contributions involved including necessary header files for data types and function declarations, and reorganizing the inclusion of dependencies. They also refactored the inclusion of "bam_cat" related code to use a header file, improving code consistency. These changes show an effort to maintain code quality and improve build processes.
python-bindingsalignersequencinggenomicsbioinformatics
StileEducation/unox
Feb 2019 - Sep 2022
Unison OS X unison-fsmonitor adapter.
Contributions:3 PRs, 6 pushes, 3 branches in 3 years 7 months
unison-fsmonitoros-xunisonadapter
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