I’m Alex Wauters - a software engineer and hands-on CTO focused on pragmatic distributed systems design, engineering leadership, and building robust, evolutionary architectures.
This blog is a place for me to share real-world takeaways, architectural patterns, and honest retrospectives from building and scaling software systems over the last 15 years. I lean toward simple, reliable engineering choices over unnecessary complexity.
Currently, I lead the engineering team at Customaite.ai, where we build an AI SaaS platform automating customs declarations.
Previously, I was a Staff Software Engineer at Uber, serving as the technical lead for Uber Freight’s marketplace carrier recommendation and booking teams.
Beyond that, my background includes building a real-time digital twin for operations at Brussels Airport, launching an award-winning peer-to-peer delivery platform from scratch at Bpost, and working in information security at Deloitte.
Projects
sendsafelink.com
A secure link-sharing tool for sending or requesting sensitive information. Links are end-to-end encrypted and self-destruct after being viewed.
Work Experience
Automating customs declarations
Customaite streamlines customs declarations through AI and intuitive UI. Aligning vision and technical roadmap to improve software maturity & scaling the product, software development in Java, Python and JavaScript.
Carrier booking @ Uber Freight
Technical lead of Uber Freight's Carrier Booking team - working on search, recommendations and booking experience for carriers in the web & mobile apps (Go & React).
Healthcare app startup in San Francisco
Provided data visualizations and insights for heart rate data. I worked on feature development, infrastructure and formulating hypothesis for product features and analyzing activation and retention.
Software delivery consultancy
Consultant for projects and also coached colleagues, gave trainings such as cloud native software development & secure software and founded the AE garage, an offering to kickstart emerging technology projects.
Digital twin for airport operations
Technical lead for Heli: digital twin for airport ops which calculates and recommends actions ahead of time. Responsible for architecture, aligning with several business stakeholders and management of the delivery team.
Innovation project of Belgian post group
Technical lead for bringr, a collaborative transportation platform which received datanews' ICT Project of the Year 2016 award. A corporate start-up within the belgian post group, led the development and technical operations of a web and mobile app.
I&AM development & security reviews
Functional specification and development of Identity & Access Management services.
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