Alex Polcyn
Software Engineer at Google
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Polcyn is a software engineer with 11 years of experience based in the San Francisco Bay Area, currently building distributed systems at Google. He has deep backend expertise in RPC and performance engineering, contributing significant optimizations and benchmarks to the widely used gRPC projects across Go, Java, and C/C++ ecosystems. His work spans low-level transport flow control, resource-reducing refactors in Go, and interoperability and authentication test coverage in Java, plus API integrations for language bindings like Ruby. Prior roles at Amazon and Keysight complement his production-grade engineering with practical systems and embedded experience. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who pairs careful benchmarking with incremental API improvements to make critical infrastructure faster and more reliable.
11 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Stackoverflow
124reputation
12kreached
15answers
0questions
Github Skills (29)
benchmark10
api-design10
testing10
microservices-application10
benchmarking10
java10
ruby10
javas10
proto10
go10
performance-optimization10
microservices10
grpc10
c-language9
lib9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
grpc/grpc
Jun 2016 - Jan 2023
The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:29 releases, 614 reviews, 1113 commits in 6 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Alex's commits primarily involve adding and modifying code related to gRPC, specifically focusing on implementing Ruby wrappers for gRPC compression options. The user's contributions involved introducing the ability to set and enable different compression levels and algorithms in the Ruby gRPC library, integrating directly with the gRPC C-core codebase to facilitate these settings. The user implemented API enhancements by replacing private ruby methods with internal C functions and providing methods to access and manipulate the compression options within the ruby library.
objective-ccpppythongrpcphp
grpc/grpc-go
Sep 2016 - Dec 2022
The Go language implementation of gRPC. HTTP/2 based RPC
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:61 reviews, 44 commits, 68 PRs in 6 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on optimizing the gRPC Go implementation, specifically around benchmark performance. They refactored benchmark client and server code to remove unnecessary goroutines and object allocations, leading to performance improvements. Furthermore, the user added metrics to the benchmark servers for comprehensive performance analysis and addressed flow control issues within the transport layer. These modifications aimed to reduce resource consumption and improve overall gRPC performance.
golangnanoservicesrpcprotoprotobuf
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.