Alexander Murmann

Leader of globally and nationally distributed teams with experience from startups to large enterprises. Builds anything from full-stack web apps to mobile and on-prem, high-performance, distributed systems. Applies Extreme Programming and Agile practices pragmatically, adapting technical approaches and team processes to fit business context rather than following dogma.

Experience

Baseline Systems

CTO & Co-Founder

March 2026 - Present Portland, OR

Building AI-driven maintenance intake and case management for property management companies. Leading product development, engineering, and technical strategy.

Independent Consulting

Independent Consultant - Software & AI Strategy

December 2025 - Present Portland, OR

• Guide technology stack decisions and software architecture
• Design and implement full-stack applications using modern frameworks (React, Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript)
• Build AI integrations including RAG systems, tool calling, and feedback loops for continuous improvement
• Scope and manage software projects from concept to deployment
• Integrate third-party APIs and build real-time features

Sabbatical

February 2024 - November 2025

Personal projects deepening hands-on expertise in modern technologies including Kotlin, TypeScript, React.js, Spring, Micronaut, k3s/k8s, GraphQL, Rails and LLMs, while prioritizing travel and family time.

VMware

Senior Manager, GemFire

January 2020 - January 2024 Portland, OR

Supervised development efforts including platform offerings on Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, and Redis-compatible APIs.

Leadership:

• Reduced cloud platform spending by 30% ($500k/yr)
• Maintained <10% attrition, managing team through several reorgs and acquisitions
• Coordinated response to critical incidents and represented company on customer calls; established formalized on-call policy and runbook
• Saved weeks of work and prevented harm to team morale by establishing a more formalized proposal process which accelerated decision making in our OSS community
• Built and managed a team of 6 in Colombia
• Streamlined release process and issue tracking to go from multiple meetings a week to a single go/no-go meeting

Pivotal Software (acquired by VMware)

Director of Engineering, GemFire

September 2019 - December 2019 Portland, OR

See post-acquisition VMware role for details.

Associate Director of Engineering, GemFire

September 2017 - August 2019 Portland, OR

Team leader for globally-distributed engineering team of 45 in developing GemFire, a distributed, highly-scalable, in-memory, high-performance, consistent data store. Supervised development of NodeJS client and REST management API.

Leadership:

• Created and evangelized a shared vision with the product team
• Directed interview practices and processes to maintain a strong, diverse hiring pipeline
• Mentored managers and ICs ranging from new grads to industry veterans

Accelerated feedback loops:

• Reduced escaped bugs by ~70% and total support issues by 1/3 while accelerating test run time from 3 days to 3 hours with increased coverage
• Implemented test-driven development, continuous integration, and iterative planning

Engineering Manager, Labs

December 2015 - September 2017 Portland, OR

Client web and mobile applications in the sports equipment and real estate industry using Java, Spring, Protobuf, Python, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and Swift on iOS.

NCC Group Domain Services

Director of Engineering

August 2013 - October 2015 Portland, OR

Managed distributed engineering team developing security scanner control and result aggregation system. Led 7 direct reports in 3 geographic locations shipping a white-glove security scanning solution on Ruby on Rails microservices backed by PostgreSQL.

Pivotal Labs

Lead Software Engineer

April 2010 - July 2013 San Francisco, CA

Led cross-functional, full-stack web development teams and coached clients in Extreme Programming practices like TDD and iterative development. Clients included Modcloth, Twilio, Sharethrough, Typekit, EMI, and Pocketgems. Technologies: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Java, Android, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Node.js, AWS, MapReduce.

Education

San Jose State University

MS, Computer Science

2008 - 2009

Universität Paderborn

BS, Computer Science & Business Studies

2003 - 2007

Publications

• Towards Robust Skill Learning With Prediction Guided Autonomy in Unknown Environments — INFORMATIK 2006
• Self-organization at the lowest level: Proactively learning skills in autonomous systems — 2006 IEEE Mountain Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Systems
• Can You Judge a Man by His Friends? Enhancing Spammer Detection on the Twitter Microblogging Platform Using Friends and Followers — 2010 Communications in Computer and Information Science

Skills

Leadership, eXtreme Programming, Agile, team organization, roadmapping, engineering strategy, OKRs, CI/CD, test-driven development (TDD), Lean, Distributed Systems, AWS, GCP, TypeScript, Ruby on Rails, Kotlin, Java, Spring, Micronaut, PostgreSQL, React, Zustand, Redis, Kubernetes, iOS

Languages: English, German

Certifications

Spring Certified Professional — Issued Jan 2024