About me

Hello!

I am Alejandro Cuervo-Hotz (né Forero Cuervo), a software engineer, husband and father. Born in 1980 in Bogota, I’ve lived in Zürich since 2007.

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Email me at a+3kp@alejo.ch.

Since 2014, the only text editor I’ve used is my own: Edge. I also maintain a few other (smaller) programs on my github account.

Work

I worked at Google from 2007 to 2026. I was a manager for five years but I missed the close contact with technology and went back to an individual contributor role. From 2009 to 2024 I led a team designing and implementing algorithms to make massive distributed systems more reliable and efficient. In 2016 I wrote chapters (Load Balancing in the Datacenter and Handling Overload) in Google’s SRE book, covering earlier algorithms we designed —which other large companies have since copied.