I keep Claude reliable on the AI Reliability Engineering (AIRE) team, 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. Before that, 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.

At QCon I spoke on using LLMs for incident response, which The Register wrote up. At SREcon I covered six years of GCE SLOs.

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, which is a polite way of saying they’d rather not be associated with them.

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

The headshots, here and elsewhere, are by Teresa Walton.