Alex Gartrell

I lead engineering at Thinking Machines Lab, building the team and the systems behind frontier AI.

About

I’m an engineering leader who came up through infrastructure. Before Thinking Machines Lab, I spent years at Meta building and leading teams focused primarily around computer systems. I also built the v0 of some of the foundational tech at Meta ranging from caching protocols to storage.

My focus has shifted to AI, where my teams are primarily focused on building the systems behind training and serving models and the products we build on top.

Selected work & talks

Twine: A Unified Cluster Management System for Shared Infrastructure Paper · OSDI ’20
How Meta runs millions of containers on shared, fungible hardware.
Executing Python functions in the Linux kernel by transpiling to BPF Talk · PyCon 2017
A pure-Python front-end that compiles simple functions down to eBPF and runs them in the kernel.
Beyond Fork and Exec: Running a Million Containers at Facebook Talk · Linux Plumbers Conference 2016
The container platform underpinning Meta’s fleet.