Hi, I'm Alex Davis.

I'm a senior product engineer with 9 years of experience building customer-facing products end-to-end, most recently at consumer scale (nearly 10 million users). I focus on AI-native features — agentic app building, production MCP integrations, and AI woven deep into the product. EU & UK citizen, open to work across Europe.

Software is hard. I work with companies and communities to untangle complex problems.

Senior Product Engineer at Whimsical (2025 — 2026)

• Applet: Built core features of Applet, Whimsical's AI-native app and website builder on an infinite canvas, turning natural-language prompts into live, editable applications (Clojure/TypeScript backend, React/TypeScript frontend).
• MCP Integration: Designed and shipped Whimsical's Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration — now listed in the official OpenAI and Anthropic connector directories — exposing the product as structured tools external AI agents can drive; extended it into the 'Ask Whimsical' in-app assistant via a browser build of the Pi agent.
• Internal Knowledge Platform: Built an MCP server + Claude/ChatGPT plugin + frontend UI that indexed and grouped activity across Slack, Linear, GitHub, Google Workspace and Whimsical, with agent tools for business analytics, customer-support answers, and porting code from Applet to Whimsical (using clojure-lsp and a source graph for efficient diffing and navigation).
• Streaming Tool-Use: Architected a streaming tool-use system with queue-based coordination, running multiple AI tool calls in parallel efficiently.
• Performance & Security: Drove build performance and security: an ESM / import-map template cutting generated-app builds to under two seconds, plus SOC2 readiness for the MCP, working with Latacora on the security team.

Head of Engineering at Artis.works (2023 — 2025)

• Frontend Leadership: Led frontend across four production applications (three ClojureScript, one TypeScript), including a high-performance Excel-like spreadsheet and candlestick charting system for high-frequency financial data.
• Performance Engineering: Partnered with the CTO to rewrite performance-critical Clojure services in Rust, cutting latency and infrastructure cost; set product priorities and raised the team's bar through code review and internal tooling.

Software Consultant at JUXT (2017 — 2023)

• Clojure Consulting: Built Clojure/ClojureScript products alongside some of the world's leading Clojure engineers, including greenfield work for a Silicon Valley unicorn and the XTDB database.
• Artis Prototype: Created early prototypes for Artis, helping secure initial investor funding; led a team of five to grow the product before moving to the Artis team permanently.

• TTRankings.com: Real-time matchmaking and scoring for table-tennis leagues, built on Cloudflare Durable Objects and SQLite.
• Table-Tennis Spin Detection: Swift / CoreML app inferring ball spin from video, based on this paper published in IROS 2023.
• Browser-Based Video Editor: CreatedBredit, a web-based video editing tool that enables users to trim, cut, crop, and export videos in multiple formats, all running directly in the browser. Has been referred to as one of the top 5 greatest bread-themed browser-based video editors ever made.
• Others: Portfolio of various, mostly broken or incomplete projects detailed at alexthings.co.uk.

Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Clojure/ClojureScript, Rust, SQL, Swift

Frontend: React, Svelte, Next.js, Reagent/Re-frame, high-performance & local-first / offline-sync UIs

Backend & Data: Node, SQL (SQLite, DuckDB, XTDB), Cloudflare Durable Objects

AI & Infra: LLM workflows, agentic / tool-use systems, MCP, RAG indexing, SOC 2 / Vanta; working with Cursor, Anthropic and OpenAI to get plugins, connectors and MCP Apps listed on official marketplaces.

University of Sussex (2013 — 2017)

• First-Class BSc, Computing for Business Management
• Exchange year at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada