Guy Alster
Engineering Manager | Stripe
Helping engineers ship faster and enterprise customers adopt the platforms they need, through reliable infrastructure and secure systems
Leadership Philosophy
I judge engineering work by the value it creates for users and the business. That means understanding who needs a change, why it matters, and how we will know it worked. I stay close to the technical details so I can help teams make the tradeoffs that connect excellent engineering to meaningful outcomes. Leadership is earned by helping people deliver those outcomes and grow in the process.
First Principles Thinking
I don't memorize solutions. I build intuition from the ground up. Whether it is proving an algorithm's correctness through induction, building a concept from "why do we need this?" to a working implementation, or learning a new language by building a data structure in it, I go deep and connect theory to practice. I bring the same rigor to leadership: understanding why before deciding what.
Ownership and High Agency
I value people who carry weight with me. When someone is ready to grow, I would rather trust them with meaningful responsibility than optimize for short-term comfort. Leadership is not just about getting the work done yourself. It is about helping more people become the kind of person others can rely on when the work is hard.
Growth as Identity
I practice algorithms when I am happily employed. I use AI as a sparring partner to stress-test my own ideas. I write about concepts I care about because I want to make them click for others. Growth is not something I do for interviews or promotions. It is how I operate, and I build teams that share that mindset.
Career Journey & Impact
Engineering Manager
Stripe
September 2025 to Present
My team improved deployment velocity by 30%, helping Stripe engineers provision and manage cloud infrastructure more efficiently without weakening security controls. I lead eight engineers in Stripe’s Compute organization, where we simplified internal infrastructure abstractions and replaced complex, imperative processes with declarative, governed workflows.
Our platform capabilities operate at 99.99% reliability, with security and compliance requirements built into the default path. This gives engineers a reliable, governed way to manage infrastructure at scale.
Technologies: Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Governance Tooling, Identity & Access Management, Distributed Systems
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft
May 2021 to September 2025
I led a team of engineers that designed and delivered Workspace-Level Private Links and Customer-Managed Keys for Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, and contributed to Managed Virtual Network capabilities. Enterprise customers needed network isolation and control over encryption keys to meet regulatory requirements before adopting the platform. The team’s work addressed those requirements and helped enable multi-billion dollar enterprise contracts.
My team enabled Power BI users to “talk with their data”: ask questions in natural language about their reports and underlying data, and receive LLM responses grounded in that information. We designed, implemented, and operated the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system behind this experience, using a vector database to store embeddings of different types of information from users’ reports. The system retrieved relevant report and data context to augment the LLM’s responses through Copilot Agents, with enterprise-grade reliability.
Technologies: C#, C++, Azure, RAG/LLM, Vector Databases, Embeddings, Network Security, Identity Management, Distributed Systems
Principal Software Engineer
Smartsheet
2019 to 2021
I modernized the platform behind Smartsheet’s reporting capabilities, replacing legacy components with a cloud architecture on AWS. As the architecture and backend development lead, I delivered the technical foundation for core product capabilities in a growing SaaS business.
Technologies: Java, MySQL, EKS, AWS, Kubernetes, Microservices
Principal Software Engineer
Splunk
2017 to 2019
I built and evolved the distributed backend platforms behind Splunk’s identity and authentication services, supporting enterprise users’ access to Splunk products. My work focused on the performance and reliability of the systems responsible for that access at enterprise scale.
Technologies: Golang, AWS, CI/CD, Aurora, PostgreSQL, Identity Systems
Senior Software Engineer
Microsoft
2012 to 2017
I improved system performance by 40% in Bing’s web crawling and image processing infrastructure by optimizing pipeline designs. These distributed systems processed petabytes of web content, supporting the collection and processing of content for Bing search.
Technologies: Distributed Systems, Zookeeper, COSMOS, Map Reduce, C++, C#
Software Engineering Manager
BigBand Networks Inc.
2006 to 2010
My seven-person team achieved 100% on-time delivery for major releases, giving the business predictable delivery of product capabilities, including real-time MPEG2 processing. I was promoted to engineering management within 18 months and led the team delivering this embedded video processing work.
Technologies: C++, Embedded Systems, Video, MPEG
Core Competencies
Leadership & Strategy
Systems & Cloud
Languages & Tools
Education
M.Sc. in Software Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
GPA: 3.85 | Pittsburgh, PA
B.Sc. in Software Engineering
Ben Gurion University
Beer Sheva, Israel