Alex van Rossum
I find the things that slow organizations down.
Fractional CTO, systems architect, AI strategist. I diagnose what's broken, architect the fix, and guide teams through execution — whether the problem is infrastructure, governance, vendor complexity, or all three at once.
Most people work in either infrastructure or governance. I work in the space between them, where the real failures happen.
Case Studies
Real problems. Real constraints. Real outcomes.
managed by a governed AI agent, daily production use for 8 months
Sysadmin Claude — Autonomous Infrastructure Agent
An autonomous infrastructure operations agent built on Claude Code. It SSHes into production servers, runs kubectl against a live EKS cluster, executes fleet-wide operations, and gets faster every session through self-maintaining institutional knowledge. Governed by layered authority — not trust.
migrated solo, zero downtime
Emergency Kubernetes Migration
The control plane died, SSH keys were lost, TLS certs expiring in weeks. I built a new EKS cluster from scratch and migrated everything — alone.
metadata changes migrated
Salesforce Architecture & Migration
Three years of stalled progress across five integrated systems. Learned the platform from zero, executed the migration, and stayed to fix the architecture.
daily PM overhead
AI Sprint Management System
A human-in-the-loop AI agent that orchestrates sprint workflows, translates between technical and client language, and maintains context across sessions.
cost reduction
AI-Assisted AWS Infrastructure Governance
Years of AWS drift. No documentation. No audit trail. An AI agent broke the information asymmetry stalemate — enumerating every service and producing the governance documentation that makes future drift measurable.
What I Do
Fractional CTO work across three domains.
Systems Architecture
Infrastructure design, Kubernetes orchestration, cloud migrations, CI/CD pipelines. I build the systems that other systems run on — for organizations that have outgrown their initial setup but don't have a dedicated infrastructure team.
AI Integration
Operational AI — not chatbots. Human-in-the-loop agents, workflow automation, prompt engineering, and the safety frameworks to deploy them responsibly. For teams that want AI doing real work, not generating summaries.
Technical Strategy
Translating business problems into architecture decisions. Evaluating build vs. buy, designing for constraints, and making the call when there is no playbook. For leaders who need a technical partner, not a vendor.
How I Think
Systems thinking. Pragmatism. Deliberate constraints.
Fix the system, not the symptom
When I look at a problem, I see how the pieces connect and where the real failure point is. The goal is an architecture where this problem doesn't come back.
Ship over perfect
The best architecture accounts for the constraints you actually have — not the ones you wish you had. I'd rather deliver something that works than design something perfect.
AI with guardrails
AI agents should be designed with deliberate constraints. The systems I build keep humans in the loop — not because the technology can't do more, but because operational safety requires it.
Latest Thinking
All posts →Ready to talk?
No pitch deck. No 30-minute discovery call. Tell me the situation, and I'll tell you whether I can help.