alexhacks

~/about

Alex Stout

Software Engineering Manager · Salt Lake City, UT

Senior software engineer with 13+ years building cloud-native systems, now leading applied-AI adoption across Goal Zero and sister brand BioLite. I design and ship LLM-powered internal tools, retrieval-augmented knowledge bases, and AI-driven data pipelines that turn unstructured sources — docs, telemetry, developer activity — into structured signal.

Deep background in AWS serverless, full-stack TypeScript, embedded firmware, and event-driven architecture: the plumbing that makes production AI systems reliable. I came up through firmware on 8-bit PICs and grew into the engineering manager who owns the cloud the firmware reports to.

CS at the University of Utah. Outside work: solar projects on the Navajo Nation through Goal Zero's give-back program, a home lab built on Raspberry Pi + ESP32 + Home Assistant, and a backyard that doubles as a firmware test bench.

$ stack --list

Expertise

Applied AILLMsRAGAWS LambdaIoT CoreDynamoDBTypeScriptNode.jsPythonC / C++Embedded firmwareReactReact NativeNext.jsServerless FrameworkTerraformCI/CDEvent-driven architectureEngineering leadership

$ git log --roles

Timeline

  1. Software Engineering Manager · Goal Zero / BioLite

    Jul 2022 — Present

    Applied-AI leadership, AWS IoT cloud architecture, engineering standards.

  2. Software Engineering Supervisor · Goal Zero

    Dec 2021 — Jul 2022

    Migration to event-driven microservices; testing frameworks at 80% coverage.

  3. Sr. Software / Firmware Engineer (IoT) · Goal Zero

    Feb 2018 — Dec 2021

    IoT platform, firmware on lithium power stations, React Native mobile.

  4. Technical Mentor · Chegg / Thinkful

    Nov 2018 — Oct 2021

    Code review, pair programming, and mock interviews on the React/Node stack.

  5. DevOps & FullStack Engineer · SilverVue

    Jul 2016 — Jan 2018

    Healthcare portal modernization, AWS Lambda, Terraform, React Native.

  6. Software / Firmware Engineer · Goal Zero

    Jan 2015 — Jul 2016

    Internal Rails app, lead-acid power-station firmware on PIC microcontrollers.

  7. Engineering Associate · Goal Zero

    Feb 2013 — May 2015

    Web apps in JavaScript / Dojo / Node.js / MongoDB; Jennic firmware.

$ contact

Get in touch

Drop a note. I read everything that lands here, even if I'm slow to respond.