I am a software engineer with 30 years experience in industry, mostly at Lead or Senior engineer level. I’m well versed in the breadth of Free, Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) technologies often associated with the GNU/Linux platform. My core competencies are in embedded systems and kernel engineering. I am a pragmatic open source advocate and contribute to several open source projects in both professional and personal capacities. I also share most of my personal code and maintain a few small open source projects.
I have a strong track record in development and successful project delivery. I am well versed in hardware development and have taken a number of heterogeneous embedded platforms from conception to manufacturing. I have an excellent understanding containerisation, virtualisation and hypervisor technologies as well as networking technologies.
I have a long history of mentorship and outreach work helping develop engineers within companies as well working with community schemes such as Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. I have also presented work at a number of conferences including a number of keynotes for the QEMU project. I write technical blog posts both for companies and communities to showcase developments and plans.
Languages: C/C++, Assembly, Rust, Python, Shell, Emacs Lisp
Architectures: ARM, x86/x86-64, PPC, SPARC, many more
Platforms: Linux (in many forms), Hypervisors (KVM/Xen), BSDs, not Windows
Tools: Emacs, GNU toolchain, GIT forges, ICE’s, scopes and logic analysers, various CI systems, common FLOSS workflows
December 2022 to Present
Senior Tech Lead for Virtualisation and Emulation
I am responsible for the core QEMU team responsible for driving the evolution of the Arm architecture support in the upstream project. As a maintainer continue to work with others across the community to keep QEMU as an active supported project for a wide variety of use cases. I work with external members and other internal groups to advise and problem solve to support up-streaming of useful features into the code base.
I am also the lead for Project Orko which is a open project to improve the range and deployments of VirtIO technology as an open abstracted interface for various workloads across multiple hypervisors.
November 2013 to December 2022
Senior Software Engineer
I support and develop new features for various flavours of virtualisation in the ARM eco-system. This predominately involves working directly with the upstream KVM and QEMU FLOSS projects. My first project was helping with the initial ARMv8 support for QEMU. Since then I’ve worked on numerous aspects of the emulator including enabling multi-threaded emulation and a plugin system for dynamic analysis. I am an upstream maintainer for a number of the QEMU subsystem and have given numerous talks at Linaro and KVM forum conferences.
November 2011 to November 2013
Head of Software/Principal Software Engineer
Reporting to the Head of Engineering I was responsible for a team of engineers maintaining all software elements (FPGA, Embedded and network management) of the VectaStar product. My responsibilities included balancing the demands on the team of supporting existing customers, improving the quality of the code base and developing new features. A major aspect of my work was modernising the development practices and reducing the reliance on knowledge locked up in the original developers heads.
March 2008 to November 2011
NMS Software Engineer
I joined the company to design and build their Network Management System. This involved taking their existing element management software (EMS) and combining it with long-term monitoring and fault finding and analysis tools on a customised distribution of Ubuntu. I also got involved in kernel work and system bring-up for new products.
January 2005 to March 2008
Lead Software Engineer
I was the Product Lead for the development of a SPARC/Solaris to x86/Solaris dynamic binary translator. I previously worked on the development of the SPARC/Solaris to x86_64/Linux translator. Aside from technical planning and leadership I also represented the company at various technical conferences and was involved in mentoring fellow engineers.
September 2002 to January 2005
Senior Code Hacker
I worked as the principle Software Engineer of a venture capital backed startup developing next generation Digital Video Recorders for the security market. I was responsible for the software architecture as well as a large portion of the in house code base. Braddahead completed a successful exit in July 2004 when it was bought by Baxall Ltd.
January 1999 to September 2002
Software Team Leader - Line Systems Development
While I was a team leader I led a variety of embedded line card projects. I was involved in a large number of process improvement activities as well as contributing my engineer experience.
December 1997 to January 1999
Software Engineer - System X Line Card Development
I started in the department supporting the existing Basic Rate ISDN line cards at the tail of the “Home Highway” development and went on to work on further line controller developments.
November 1994 to December 1997
Software Engineer - Video Game Development
I worked doing analysis, simulation, implementation and testing of Video Gaming software for various Casinos and other high stakes markets.
July 1994 to November 1994
Software Engineer
I was taken on a short-term contract to develop an experimental teaching aid for the deaf. During my time there I became involved in a variety of other projects including writing software to drive some prototype industrial hardware.
University of Manchester - BSc. in Chemistry
My final year project was a computer based analysis of Transfer RNA.
- Name: Alexis James Bennée
- Location: South Wales, UK
- Email: alex@bennee.com
- Homepage: www.bennee.com/~alex/
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbennee