New Hire: Welcome Alex as our Senior Platform Engineer

We are excited to welcome Alex Burkey to Quindar as our Senior Platform Engineer! Alex is a former Stripe platform engineer and an avid fly fisher!

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Q: Can you share with us a bit about your career path?

After graduating from Virginia Tech I worked for a small consulting firm doing all manner of cloud projects including work on a data pipeline. That experience became the foundation for my career as a platform and infrastructure engineer on various pipeline and platform teams.

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Q: I'm curious to know what sparked your interest in space?

I’ve always had an interest in space! I recall seeing a few talks from experts on exo-planets and getting to meet one of the engineers that designed the solar panels on the Mars rover, Opportunity. I’m excited to have finally found a great company in the space industry to work for.

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Q: Moving on to your current position at Quindar, what aspect of it excites you the most?

I’m so excited to join Quindar at this early stage. I’m excited about the direction of the space industry and the part that Quindar will play in shaping the landscape of the industry in the coming years.

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Q: As someone with experience outside of the aerospace industry, what skills or knowledge do you hope to bring to Quindar and the wider community?

I’ve worked on distributed systems my entire career, but so far this will be my first project where I’m working directly with “servers” in space! I hope that my knowledge of scalable and performant distributed systems will lay a solid foundation for Quindar’s product and users. 

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Q: Looking back on your journey so far, what advice would you give to your younger self?

Get your hands dirty sooner! You’ll learn more, more quickly by prototyping and trying things out rather than reading the docs top to bottom. Focus on an iterative process with a short feedback loop rather than trying to plan it perfectly.

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Q: What brings you joy and happiness in your free time?

I love going fly fishing on the many rivers and streams in Colorado. Trout live in beautiful places and it’s always a joy to be by the water and the mountains. I also love going swing dancing with my wife. It’s a great workout, allows us to be creative and listen to awesome jazz music (often live bands!).

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