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. Incidents I’ve run have made Bloomberg, The Verge and others. Claude goes down a lot less now, and I apologise to the gods of reliability for saying so.

I’m based in New York, originally from Romania, and lived in London for ten years. 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 SREcon 2026 I spoke in the closing plenary on AGI and SRE, and to convince a room of sceptical engineers I finished on a music video about pagers and whisky. At Signals in Berlin I asked whether Claude can fix itself.

The Register has covered me twice, once for a QCon talk on using LLMs for incident response and once for a global GCP outage I inadvertently caused. In the second edition of the SRE Book, I appear as the incident commander for a data centre water leak and fire in Paris.

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.

Among my hobbies, I forecast current affairs on Metaculus, where, as of mid-2026, I’m in the top 20 by peer accuracy.

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.