Alex Rivera

VERIFIED WRITER

@alexrivera·Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Building resilient distributed systems and vector database engines. Previously at AWS & Stripe.

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3 Published Essays

48.2k Total Reads

Published by Alex Rivera

3 stories

System Design9 min read

Building a Production-Grade RAG Pipeline with PostgreSQL and pgvector

Dedicated vector databases are great, but managing another piece of infrastructure isn't always necessary. In this guide, we dive deep into HNSW indexing, quantization, and hybrid full-text search directly inside Postgres.

Alex Rivera

Staff Infrastructure Engineer·Aug 28, 2026

Backend14 min read

Designing Fault-Tolerant Event Streams with Raft Consensus in Go

Building high-availability distributed systems requires strong consistency guarantees. Here is how we implemented Raft consensus for an internal distributed log.

Alex Rivera

Staff Infrastructure Engineer·Aug 25, 2026

DevOps8 min read

The Playbook for Zero-Downtime Database Migrations at Scale

Altering a billion-row table in production is nerve-wracking. Learn the exact four-phase pattern used by top engineering teams to migrate schemas without downtime.

Alex Rivera

Staff Infrastructure Engineer·Aug 24, 2026