Final Fantasy Mode Activated
Portland, OR - Data Platform, Engineering, Analytics
I'm Alex Norum. I've spent fourteen years working across data platforms, data engineering, and analytics. Most recently I owned LegalZoom's data platform end to end and led the team that ran it. Simple systems where the right way is the easy way.
01 - What I Do
Building and running the infrastructure, governance, and self-service tooling that data teams work on top of.
Building pipelines with Airflow, Spark, and Kafka, along with the testing and monitoring that keeps them reliable.
I started my career as an analyst. Data modeling, metrics, and reporting are still part of how I work.
I led the data platform team at LegalZoom: hiring, mentoring, and planning, while continuing to write code.
Building AI agents, MCP servers, and LLM tools on top of the data platform.
02 - Experience
Led the small team that owned LegalZoom's data platform - Snowflake, Airflow on Kubernetes, dbt, Terraform, and the self-service tooling around all of it.
Rebuilt LegalZoom's platform from a legacy stack to Kubernetes-native - Airflow, Terraform-managed Snowflake, and GitOps for everything.
Started as a data analyst and moved to the data platform team. Owned the platform roadmap, built blue/green deployments and testing frameworks, and brought dbt to the org.
Worked across R&D, manufacturing, and supply chain building analytics and migrating Oracle's worldwide SCM systems to cloud.
University of Oregon - Information Systems and Operations Management
03 - Fun Projects
Things I build on nights and weekends.
Is the train blocking the intersection?
Portland freight trains park across SE crossings, so this tells me before I leave the house. ODOT camera frames run through a Kafka and Iceberg pipeline on my k3s cluster, with Postgres and Cloudflare serving the live board.
Sight-reading practice for piano with a MIDI keyboard.
Generates random but musically sensible sight-reading exercises for piano, from easy to brutal. Plug in a MIDI keyboard and it checks what you actually played, note by note.
Rebuilt a lost Super Mario Odyssey save.
My nephew lost his Super Mario Odyssey save, so I built a save editor to rebuild his moon collection. It grew into a complete editor: every moon in every kingdom, viewable and editable by its real name.
Not a showpiece. A place I break things.
A k3s cluster (nodes swagman-1 and swagman-2) plus a Raspberry Pi 5 running Home Assistant. Tailscale and Cloudflare tunnels for access, Strimzi Kafka, MinIO, and Iceberg for the data side. It runs PDX Train around the clock and whatever gets built next.
A chatbot of my dog.
A chatbot version of my labradoodle Mara that lived on an earlier version of this website. Retired, but preserved for the record.
04 - Stack
Snowflake Airflow dbt Kafka Terraform Kubernetes AI Agents & MCP
Core: Python · SQL · Airflow · Snowflake · dbt · Spark · Kafka · Flink · Kubernetes · Terraform · AWS
Also: Delta Lake · Iceberg · Postgres · Docker · GitHub Actions · GitOps
AI: LLM tooling · MCP servers · Agents · Slack bots · Claude Code and Cursor, daily
Honest levels: TypeScript and React: can build things, not expert
05 - How I Think
And when you can't resolve ambiguity yourself: build the interface that lets the actual owner resolve it, and make the guardrails carry the risk.
06 - Off the Clock
