About

I'm Alex Dixon, an engineering leader at Stripe. I lead a team of Integration Reliability Engineers who work directly with Stripe merchants and financial partners to deploy card programs, debug integrations, and keep things running across a lot of transaction volume.

Before Stripe I spent six years at Fast Enterprises deploying software for government agencies. Driver's licenses, vehicle registrations, unemployment systems. The kind of software where downtime actually matters to people. I was customer-facing the whole time, handling everything from requirements through go-live and production support. It was a grind, but it shaped how I think about shipping software more than anything else I've done.

I carried that background into Stripe and into how I think about building teams. I care a lot about engineers who can go deep technically and also sit across from a customer and own an outcome. At Stripe I've focused on growing that kind of engineer, through Staff promotions, career frameworks, and working through hard problems together.

Cooking

Cooking is how I unwind. I smoke a lot of meat, lean toward southern-style cooking, and have a running obsession with fermentation — hot sauces, pickles, anything that takes patience and a mason jar. My wife is Italian, so our kitchen has a second life making fresh pasta and pizza dough from scratch. Lately I've also been roasting my own coffee, which has turned into a genuine education in where the thing you drink every morning actually comes from.

I'm using this site to document recipes for my family. If that's why you're here, head to the cooking posts.

Personal Finance

I think about personal finance a lot. Index funds, tax-advantaged accounts, how to think about risk, whether the FIRE movement makes sense. I help friends think through their financial decisions and genuinely enjoy it. Most content on this topic is generic or trying to sell you something, so I write about what I actually think and the decisions I've made with my own money.