I’m Alex Palcuie, a Member of Technical Staff on the AI Reliability Engineering (AIRE) team at Anthropic. I keep Claude reliable, which means the unenviable job of fixing Claude without Claude when it goes down.

I’m based in London, originally from Romania. I write a blog at blog.palcu.net and occasionally angel invest.

I spent 8 years as an SRE on Google Compute Engine (GCE). I was also on Tech IRT, the incident response team for Google-wide outages, and a founding engineer of Cloud IRT for GCP outages. I gave a talk at SREcon on six years of GCE SLOs.

Before Google, I was a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir and a software engineer for both the Government of Romania and uberVU, a startup later acquired by Hootsuite.

I follow the writings of Scott Alexander, Matt Levine, Patrick McKenzie and Tyler Cowen. Matt Levine once wrote about me for arbitraging vacation days at Google, which, despite the column’s usual beat, was not securities fraud.

You can contact me at alex.palcuie@gmail.com, on Twitter, or on LinkedIn. I accept emails from humans and AI models, but I can’t promise to reply to everything.

My employers, past and present, require me to state that views here and on any of my social media accounts are my own. They’d also like me to stop writing post-meta-ironic takes, but the pay cheques keep arriving, so I assume the tradeoffs are worth it.

My nickname is Palcu, pronounced as PAL-koo. My family name is pronounced PAL-koo-yeh.