Alex Hornby
Core Engineering Director at Tower Research Capital
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Hornby is a Core Engineering Director and seasoned engineering leader with over two decades of experience designing high-performance distributed systems and developer productivity platforms. He has advised CTO/CIO-level stakeholders and led large teams to deliver resilient, scalable infrastructure across finance and tech, from FRTB risk engines at Morgan Stanley to developer monorepo and productivity initiatives at bp. At Meta he shipped Rust-based source control and realtime data pipelines powering over 110TB/s for AI and analytics, and his open-source DevOps work shows deep expertise in CI/CD and build systems across major Facebook repos like Velox, Folly and Sapling. Known for blending hands-on engineering (C++, Rust, databases, caching) with strategic program leadership, he repeatedly converts complex architecture problems into measurable operational improvements. He’s also a pragmatic recruiter and mentor who institutionalized metrics-driven developer productivity and DORA maturity at scale. Based in London, he currently focuses on developer tooling and productivity at Tower Research Capital.
6 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at University of Warwick
Github Skills (45)
dependency-management10
caching10
github-ci10
gnu-make10
docker10
python10
windows10
linux10
bash10
build-system10
cmake10
makefile10
dockers10
data-structure10
cicd10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/sapling
Jul 2019 - Feb 2022
A Scalable, User-Friendly Source Control System.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:707 commits, 66 PRs, 6 pushes in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Alex's contributions primarily revolve around the development and optimization of a scalable source control system. They implemented features for reporting blobstore usage by key type during the process of scrubbing and refactored code for more efficient data storage and processing. Their work focused on improving the system's performance and maintainability, as evidenced by code refactoring and addition of memory usage. The user also added support for the ability to select how to treat write mostly stores.
control-systemscalablesource-controluser-friendly
facebookincubator/fizz
Mar 2021 - Feb 2022
C++14 implementation of the TLS-1.3 standard
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:62 commits, 7 PRs, 2 comments in 11 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily contributed to improving the build and deployment process of the `fizz` repository. They added support for CentOS Stream and updated Boost RPM package names. They also modified the build scripts to build OpenSSL and CMake in parallel, and implemented features such as adding a dry-run option to install system dependencies and including system package state in the cache key, further improving the efficiency and reliability of the build process. Moreover, they addressed GitHub Actions configurations, including updating to v2 upload-artifact and adding OS filtering to the action generation.
tlscppssltls13
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