Final Fantasy Mode Activated
Portland, OR - Data Platform Engineering
I'm Alex Norum. Fourteen years building data platforms, most recently LegalZoom's - infrastructure, pipelines, governance, and the AI tooling on top, owned end to end. I've led the team too. Simple systems where the right way is the easy way.
01 - What I Do
Tools people actually want to use. Good docs, clean interfaces, fewer Slack questions.
Designing systems that are simple to operate, easy to understand, and don't require hand-holding.
Grew engineers, removed blockers, and kept the right things simple. Led the team, still shipped.
Building AI agents, MCP servers, and LLM-powered tools so the platform helps you help yourself.
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.
Joined as a data analyst, left owning the data platform roadmap. Built blue/green deployments, 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.
Piano sight-reading practice that listens back.
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. She had opinions.
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
