Alan Ning

Software Engineer / Problem Solver

Work

Software Architect

– Present

Founding engineer of the Manifold.ai platform, responsible for designing and building core systems across the stack.

  • Architected platform infrastructure spanning bioinformatics data pipelines, AI security, and scalable cloud networking.

  • Built developer tooling that enables LLM agents to iterate safely, accelerating engineering productivity across the team.

Staff Reliability Engineer

I create scalability solutions for Tenable.io.

  • Designed and implemented a custom Elasticsearch sharding layer to break out a petabytes-scale monolith database into an infinitely scalable number of databases.

  • Implemented a caching layer for the Tenable.io edge using Cloudflare Worker. This layer handles over 5000 requests per sec, and saves petabytes of bandwidth per year.

Site Reliability Engineer

Uptime2020 Consultant

Supported various election-related SaaS companies to ensure their product security and reliability during the 2020 US election cycle.

Site Reliability Engineer

I began as the SRE for Caseflow and left having architected the VA's migration to AWS.

  • Guided the VA cloud migration effort, including Direct Connect configurations, network performance analysis, and VPC design that scales for thousands of tenants.

  • Led the SRE team for the Veterans Appeals modernization effort (Caseflow).

  • Migrated the 30 year old Oracle database that holds all Veterans Appeals to the cloud using AWS DMS.

Technical Lead

I began as a React/Node.js coach and left as the Technical Lead on the Disability Case Processing System (DCPS).

  • Led the Social Security Disability modernization project, integrating a microservice architecture with legacy mainframe systems.

  • Delivered a highly visible MVP under a tight deadline, which led to successful product shipment across many states.

Technical Lead Engineer

I began as an embedded C++ developer and left as a full stack software developer.

  • Wrote high performance C++ code for embedded systems, with a focus on memory safety and concurrency.

  • Developed applications across a wide range of platforms, from Android and CUDA to Node/React web apps.

  • Grew into a technical lead role across multiple projects, including cybersecurity research.

Education

Johns Hopkins University

Master in Computer Science

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Bachelor in Computer Science / Economics (Summa Cum Laude)

Skills

AI & LLM Engineering

  • Pydantic AI
  • OpenAI
  • MCP
  • Agent Evaluation
  • Bedrock

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • ECS
  • RDS
  • Lambda
  • S3
  • Packer

Backend Development

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Node.js
  • SQLAlchemy
  • PostgreSQL
  • Snowflake

Data Engineering

  • Airflow
  • dbt
  • Prefect
  • OpenSearch
  • Pandas

Observability

  • OpenTelemetry
  • Logfire
  • Structlog

Systems Programming

  • Modern C++
  • C