Infrastructure / Platform / DevEx engineer | Tooling aficionado
Meta.
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My name is Aleksandr Mikhailov - Alex for short. I’m a platform engineer, and my pronouns are he/him.
Current role and employer
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I’m currently a Senior Platform Engineer at Samsung Food.
What the work looks like
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My day-to-day is mostly making other developers’ work feel lighter. I wrap the tools and libraries we depend on so their APIs match how we want to write code — with monitoring and tracing baked in — and write the kind of guides that actually unstick someone setting things up for the first time.
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The exact shape moves around depending on where teams currently get stuck. I try to follow the friction rather than stay in one lane.
Experience
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I’m self-taught and have worked in the industry for 12 years. I began as a general software developer and gradually shifted toward building tools for other developers.
Past roles
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Samsung Food — Platform Engineer (2022–2024) — cross-service platform tooling: dependency governance, observability work, service warmups, and day-to-day developer experience.
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Samsung Food — Full Stack Engineer (2019–2022) — internal annotation, entity-management, search, audit/rollback, and UGC moderation tooling for recipe and food data.
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VisualThreat — Full Stack Developer (2016–2019) — CAN data tooling for vehicle security testing: storage, query language, visualizations, and video-synced replay.
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LiveTex — Developer (2014–2016) — chat systems, frontend architecture for an Intercom-like pluggable web app, and conversion tracking.
Favorite / main languages
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My main language is Scala, but I’m also comfortable with TypeScript and Java. I have some experience with Lua, Go, Lisp, Clojure, Kotlin, Rust, and OCaml. Knowing these languages gives me a broader outlook.
What excites you today?
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Lately I’m driven by declarative system configuration, overall performance, security, secrecy, and applied cryptography. Now I’m trying to dig deep into sandboxing, governance, egress control, credential proxies, and overall isolation of processes. In the agentic era, this should be a relevant area for tinkering.
Side interests / fun fact
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My hobbies are on the nerdy side. I run a small VPN for friends and family who live in a country with less freedom. I also love cycling, though it’s tough here because of all the hills. I live with ADHD, depression, and social anxiety. ADHD means my interests shift quickly, and the other two keep me working on understanding myself.