About

Alexander
William King.

Born in NJ, raised in Austin. Dual US & British citizen. UT Longhorn. Spent a chapter in LA running a computer repair shop. Now leading SRE for enterprise AI at Merck — and spending my off hours on the court or in the garden.

The story so far.

I was born in New Jersey and raised in Austin, Texas — a dual US & British citizen who grew up a 90s kid with a basketball in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. Went to UT and got a degree in Kinesiology while spending more time at workbenches than in lecture halls.

In 2014 I moved to Los Angeles to run a computer repair shop. Spent years pulling apart machines, diagnosing the unfixable, and learning that every software problem has a physical reality underneath it. That instinct never left.

I came back to Austin, joined Walmart, and worked my way from IT coordination through software engineering before landing in SRE — where the hardware mindset finally had a name. Now I'm at Merck, leading reliability for enterprise AI platforms across three cloud providers.

Off the clock: I'm on the basketball court or in the garden. Still playing ball regularly — and landscaping is the best possible counterweight to distributed systems.

Skills & tools.

Amazon EKSKubernetesTerraformOpenTelemetryGrafanaNobl9 SLOs-as-codeAzure OpenAIAWS BedrockGoogle Vertex AICloudWatchAzure MonitorPythonAngularGraphQLKQLCI/CDIncident ResponseMulti-CloudSLO / SLI / Error Budgets

Education

University of Texas at Austin

B.S., Kinesiology · Hook 'em

Experience

Where I've been.

2023

Merck

SRE — Enterprise AI Platforms

Remote

Lead a 3-person SRE function keeping enterprise AI platforms alive at scale — an 85,000-user chatbot, OCR extraction pipelines, translation services, and document authoring tools serving millions of monthly requests across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Built OpenTelemetry observability, manage 58+ SLOs-as-code via Nobl9, and own incident response end to end.

2022

Walmart

ServiceNow Reporting & Performance Analytics Lead

Austin, TX

Led reporting and performance analytics for IT service management. Drove cross-functional incident resolution, root cause analysis, governance frameworks, and stakeholder trust.

2021

Walmart

Software Engineer

Austin, TX

Built Angular UI features and GraphQL API logic for an internal self-service business process automation platform used across multiple enterprise teams.

2019

Walmart

Onsite IT Coordinator

Austin, TX

Maintained enterprise technology assets and bridged technical and non-technical teams — the role that made enterprise software make sense.

2014

ER Computer Repair & others

Computer Repair — Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles, CA

Moved from Austin to LA in 2014 to run a computer repair shop. Also worked at Geeks R Us, King Geeks, and Sherrill & Gibson. Where hardware became more than a hobby and systems thinking became instinct.