ALEX
BLOUNT_

Power Triage owns the automated systems that surface and rank battery impact across Apple's software platforms — the infrastructure that sits between engineering decisions and the hardware release cycles that don't move for anyone. I align the team's work to those cycles, build the tooling that makes problems visible early, and make the calls on what gets prioritized.

In parallel, I ran an experiment in AI-native development. Piloted Claude Code and agentic PR review with one team, measured results against work item burn-down, hit roughly 25% productivity improvement in the early stages. The more interesting signal was behavioral: engineers started surfacing improvement work outside their assigned scope without being asked. That's not something you can mandate — it's what happens when the tooling changes how people think about the work. Codified the whole approach into an onboarding and measurement workbook, then scaled it org-wide through pilot validation, not decree.

Package management for hundreds of game studios building and shipping to Xbox and PC. The GDX platform is the dependency chain underneath everything those studios do — if it's slow, flaky, or opaque, that friction shows up in every build, every release, every crunch. I inherited a team in reactive mode: ticket queues, one-off fixes, engineers who were good at firefighting because that's all they'd been asked to do.

Made the call to stop and rebuild it as a service-oriented platform. That meant saying no to a lot of short-term requests to build things that would actually scale. Drove the shift from "we fix your problems" to "here's a paved path that makes the problem not exist." Studios started pulling on what we built rather than calling when something broke. Held team stability and output through three rounds of reorgs and priority resets without losing people or momentum.

Started managing Matchmaking and grew into Competitive Systems and Content Discovery — four teams and their managers, roughly 20 engineers, distributed across time zones. Fortnite at peak scale: live events, daily updates, the kind of traffic that makes infrastructure decisions feel irreversible. Owned the AWS-based distributed backend in Java, Scala, and Akka. Built the operational baseline for these services from scratch: health monitoring, incident response patterns, on-call rotations.

The real work was the org. Figuring out who had manager potential and what they needed to grow into it. Designing the team topology so it could make decisions and run without me in every room. Building the next layer of leadership rather than being the ceiling. That's the job at this level — working on the org, not just in it.

I joined as cross-platform development was still being figured out — before React Native, before Flutter mattered — and spent seven years embedded with the engineering teams of large enterprises trying to ship iOS and Android applications simultaneously. Advisory meant being in the room for every hard conversation: when to go native, when shared code was the right trade-off, when the framework itself was the problem and you had to say so.

Defined standards and patterns that held across teams I didn't directly manage. Carried the work through Microsoft's acquisition of Xamarin and kept doing the same thing inside a much larger org. Stayed seven years because the problems kept being interesting and the teams kept needing someone who'd seen enough failure to know what actually worked.