Guy Alster
Engineering Manager | Stripe
Building resilient systems and teams that take pride in excellent engineering
Leadership Philosophy
I believe a manager is, first and foremost, a leader, and leadership is earned, not assigned. I stay close to the technical details because I believe great engineering leadership requires understanding the systems your teams build, not just the people who build them.
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
Engineering Manager
Stripe
September 2025 to Present
I lead a platform engineering team in Stripe's Compute organization that builds the systems used to provision and manage cloud infrastructure at scale. My team of 8+ engineers owns platform capabilities that provision cloud infrastructure with 99.99% reliability. We simplified internal infrastructure abstractions, which improved deployment velocity by 30% without weakening security controls. My team built the automation and guardrails that made it easier for cloud resources to meet security and compliance requirements by default.
Technologies: Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Governance Tooling, Identity & Access Management, Distributed Systems
Principal Engineering Manager
Microsoft
May 2021 to September 2025
I led engineering teams across two major areas of Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. On the AI side, my team owned the design, implementation and operational management of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that integrated Power BI artifacts with Copilot Agents, delivering AI-enabled experiences while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability.
On the enterprise fundamentals side, I owned and delivered foundational security and networking capabilities that enabled enterprise customers to adopt Microsoft's data platform with stronger isolation, control, and trust. I architected and delivered features including Workspace-Level Private Links and Customer-Managed Keys, enabling multi-billion dollar enterprise contracts by meeting strict regulatory requirements for network isolation and encryption control. I also contributed to Managed Virtual Network capabilities, strengthening secure cloud deployment patterns for enterprise data workloads.
Technologies: C#, C++, Azure, RAG/LLM, Network Security, Identity Management, Distributed Systems
Principal Software Engineer
Smartsheet
2019 to 2021
Led architecture and backend development for core product capabilities in a high-growth SaaS environment. Drove the modernization of the reporting platform, replacing legacy components with a modern cloud architecture on AWS.
Technologies: Java, MySQL, EKS, AWS, Kubernetes, Microservices
Principal Software Engineer
Splunk
2017 to 2019
Built and evolved distributed backend platforms for Splunk's identity and authentication services, with a focus on enterprise-scale performance and reliability.
Technologies: Golang, AWS, CI/CD, Aurora, PostgreSQL, Identity Systems
Senior Software Engineer
Microsoft
2012 to 2017
Developed distributed systems for large-scale web crawling and image processing for Bing. Improved system performance by 40% through optimized pipeline designs, processing petabytes of web content.
Technologies: Distributed Systems, Zookeeper, COSMOS, Map Reduce, C++, C#
Software Engineering Manager
BigBand Networks Inc.
2006 to 2010
Promoted to management within 18 months, leading a 7-person team. Achieved 100% on-time delivery for major releases and introduced real-time MPEG2 processing capabilities.
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