Alexander Kern
Software Engineer at Kern.io
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Kern is a seasoned software engineer and founder with 12 years of experience building scalable, real-time web systems from prototype to production. Based in San Francisco, he has led startups and product teams—most recently as Founder & CEO of Dynaboard (acquired by Figma) and now engineering at Figma—while advising and angel investing in early-stage tooling and crypto projects. He has deep full-stack and infrastructure chops, demonstrated by building peer-to-peer in-browser file transfers (filepizza) and architecting Coinbase’s unified cryptocurrency payments and staking infrastructure. His strengths span product-led engineering, Kubernetes/Elasticsearch deployments, WebRTC/Socket.IO real-time stacks, and performance-driven backend work. Known for turning research-grade ideas into shipping products, he also has a history of community building (founding Cal Hacks) and uncommon domain breadth from JPL robotics storage to modern AI/ML and crypto tooling.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BA Computer Science, BA Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
106reputation
7kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (35)
kubernetes10
javascript10
docker10
python10
amazon-elasticsearch10
dockers10
flask-ask10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
kubernetes-pods10
elasticsearch10
flask10
react10
elasticsearch-api10
expressjs9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
dsys/match
Mar 2016 - Jun 2018
:crystal_ball: Scalable reverse image search built on Kubernetes and Elasticsearch
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:44 commits, 13 PRs, 47 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Alexander primarily worked on the back-end infrastructure and deployment aspects of the image search project. Their contributions include dockerizing the application and reorganizing source files for better structure. They also introduced benchmarking scripts and made modifications to the server setup, including switching to gevent and then back to gunicorn, along with configuring the all_orientations parameter. These changes suggest a focus on scalability, performance, and deployment optimization within the Kubernetes and Elasticsearch environment.
scalablecrystal-ballcrystaldockerimage-signatures
kern/filepizza
Feb 2015 - Feb 2021
:pizza: Peer-to-peer file transfers in your browser
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:4 reviews, 214 commits, 111 PRs in 6 years
Contributions summary:Alexander contributed to the development of a peer-to-peer file transfer application, evidenced by the implementation of both client-side and server-side functionality. Initial commits set up an Express.js application with basic routing. The user then integrated client-side code using Browserify and implemented Firebase support, demonstrating skills in backend and frontend integration. Further commits involved moving static assets and integrating WebRTC, and later, Socket.IO, indicating a progression from basic web application setup to real-time communication.
reactbrowserp2pjavascriptwebrtc
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