Alex Leow
Software Engineer at Benchling
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Leow is a software engineer based in San Francisco with 10 years of experience building reliable systems, tooling, and CI/CD pipelines across startups and open-source projects. Currently at Benchling, he blends backend engineering with DevOps and automation expertise, having significantly improved build and test infrastructure for high-profile projects like Socket.IO and Engine.IO. He co-founded Med.ID, applying blockchain concepts to decentralized medical data, and has hands-on product leadership experience delivering MVPs and SOP-driven process improvements for clients. Early open-source work includes foundational Java contributions to the AddressBook education project and QA-focused test automation that improved maintainability and parsing robustness. Comfortable moving between code, automation, and product strategy, Alex brings a pragmatic engineering mindset informed by teaching and mentorship roles at NUS and practical field experience as a combat medic. He combines deep technical craft with a proven ability to make developer workflows more reproducible and scalable.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence Focus (Honours with Distinction), 3.8/4.0, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence Focus (Honours with Distinction), 3.8/4.0 at National University of SingaporeSilicon Valley, Batch 31, Silicon Valley, Batch 31 at NUS Overseas CollegesGCE Advanced Level (Sciences), AAAA/A (Distinction), GCE Advanced Level (Sciences), AAAA/A (Distinction) at Temasek Junior CollegeManagement Science & Engineering - Entrepreneurship Studies, 4.0/4.0, Management Science & Engineering - Entrepreneurship Studies, 4.0/4.0 at Stanford University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (29)
javascript10
testing10
gulp10
websocket10
eslint10
java10
cicd10
webpack10
javas10
mochajs10
automation10
junit10
websockets-client10
browser-testing10
webpacker10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
se-edu/addressbook-level2
Aug 2016 - Aug 2016
:ab::two: A Java sample application for students. An AddressBook application that uses OOP basics.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 20 PRs, 46 pushes in 26 days
Contributions summary:Alex's primary contribution was establishing the foundation of the AddressBook application, initiating the core Java code. This involved cleaning, refactoring, and integrating the final features. The user converted the project to the AddressBook context by implementing a basic version of the application's core structure and adding initial data representations.
javaaddressbookoopsample-application
socketio/engine.io-client
Jan 2016 - Feb 2016
The engine used in the Socket.IO JavaScript client, which manages the low-level transports such as HTTP long-polling, WebSocket and WebTransport.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:40 commits, 7 PRs, 1 comment in 19 days
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on improving the build and test processes within the `engine.io-client` repository. Their contributions centered around integrating Gulp for build automation, adding tasks for testing (including node and browser tests with Zuul), and configuring the test environment to run correctly within different browsers and environments. The user implemented continuous integration practices by adding linting and standardized build tasks, and set up the test-coverage with istanbul.
socketwebsocketssocket-iojavascript-clientlong-polling
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