Alex Milkov

SUMMARY

More recent expertise in blockchain and protocol development on Solana. Background in distributed systems and programming language theory. Strongest across Rust, TypeScript, backend systems and shipping end-to-end products for small teams. Have picked up FE and devops in recent years and can ramp quickly on any domain

EXPERIENCE

Ibex Labs Ltd., Founder Oct 2022 — Present

https://ibexlabs.xyz

Boutique software consultancy focused on Solana, Rust, Typescript, backend systems, and shipping end-to-end products for small teams.
Nation (Oct 2022 - (advisory) Present): Built products across Nation's Solana ecosystem, including the core DAO platform, Vellum (a DocuSign-like document signing product on Solana with GPT-assisted drafting and post-signature actions), and Caro (a low-latency real-time auction engine embedded in Shopify storefronts).
Render Foundation (May 2023 - (advisory) Present): Led major portions of Render's Ethereum-to-Solana migration, including burn-and-mint equilibrium, token bridge and exchange migrations, reward/payment automation, supporting Solana programs, backend services, dashboards, and production infrastructure.
CFI (Jan 2026 - Present): Building onchain lending infrastructure for agricultural loans, including Solana programs, backend services, and surrounding product and ops systems.

Square (Block), Senior Software Engineer Jul 2019 — Oct 2022

https://block.xyz

Inventory team: Backend end services (Go) which manage merchant inventory (counts, costs, etc) and provide reporting
Items team: Backend service (Go) which manages merchant catalogs (what they sell). Datastore is sharded MySQL. Search is backed by Elasticsearch. Rearchitected next generation of this service which is a generic object store all teams can use, backed again by MySQL
Introduced Rust to Square by porting internal libraries necessary to run a service in Square's environments. (gRPC + HTTP server framework, clients, custom protobuf compiler, admin console, MySQL + Redis integration, logging, metrics, Envoy, builds, feeds, jobs, etc)
Lots of design docs, PR reviews, interviews, and documentation writing

Comcast, Senior Software Engineer (Contract) Jun 2018 — Dec 2018

https://weather.com

Full stack work on isomorphic system - Scala.js + React bindings, Scala backend (heavy functional programming shop) - enabling operators to remotely manage the configuration of hundreds of thousands of newly rolled out networking devices

The Weather Company (IBM), Senior Software Engineer Sep 2016 — Jun 2019

https://weather.com

Migrated services to EKS (AWS's managed Kubernetes) and carved out best practices and recommended tooling (Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, Loki, nginx-ingress, etc) as part of org-wide migration to IBM Cloud
Responsible for developing and maintaining user profile system (Scala) that manages all user data such as subscriptions, locations, demographics, and device endpoints
Responsible for developing and maintaining alerting system (Scala), which fetches user subscriptions, populates content templates, and distributes them to devices
Lead initiatives to adopt libraries and develop tooling in the purely functional side of the Scala ecosystem. Mentored engineers in functional programming language theory

EDUCATION

Georgia Institute of Technology Jan 2015 — Dec 2018

M.S. - Computer Science

Georgia Institute of Technology Aug 2011 — Dec 2014

B.S. - Industrial Engineering

SKILLS

Languages: Rust, TypeScript, Go, Python, Scala, SQL, JavaScript, Haskell, Clojure, Java

Blockchain: Solana, Sui, Ethereum

Datastores: Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, ArangoDB

Infrastructure: Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, Grafana, Prometheus, Vercel, Supabase