Alex Little's Resume

Alex Little

VP of Engineering @ Lapse

United Kingdom

AL

About

Engineering leader with 7+ years of experience, progressing from Junior iOS Developer to VP of Engineering. Deep expertise in native iOS development with Swift, now focused on distributed systems, realtime infrastructure with Elixir, and cross-platform mobile architecture with Rust. Passionate about performance engineering, developer tooling, and building teams that ship high-quality products.

Work Experience

Lapse

March 2024 - Present

VP of Engineering

Leading a 15-person engineering organisation, setting technical direction across backend infrastructure and mobile clients for Lapse.
  • Member of senior leadership, working with the founders on product roadmap, feature prioritisation, and company strategy
  • Led development of a graph-style database service achieving sub-ms reads and 95% cache hit ratio for millions of users
  • Architecting distributed systems for social graph, realtime messaging, and data deletion
  • Designing cross-platform mobile architecture with shared Rust core across iOS and Android
  • Building reactive state management and offline-first persistence layers for native clients
  • Driving infrastructure strategy across EKS, ElastiCache, and ClickHouse for analytics and event processing
  • Establishing engineering processes, technical roadmaps, and hiring standards across teams
  • Rust
  • Elixir
  • TypeScript
  • ClickHouse
  • AWS
  • Swift

Lapse

November 2022 - April 2024

Lead iOS Engineer

Led 7 iOS engineers, reaching #1 on the US App Store with 10M+ users.
  • Architected offline-first sync engine for reliable data persistence across unreliable networks
  • Built CI/CD pipelines, developer CLIs, and internal tooling to improve team productivity
  • Led performance engineering efforts including profiling, optimisation, and image processing pipelines
  • Established code review processes, hiring standards, and mentorship programs for the team
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • CI/CD
  • Team Leadership

Lapse

January 2022 - November 2022

Senior iOS Engineer

Built the Lapse iOS app from the ground up, acting as technical lead for a team of 3 engineers.
  • Architected the entire iOS codebase, establishing patterns for navigation, state management, and data persistence with Realm
  • Built core features across the app including camera, feed, messaging, and social features
  • Laid technical foundations that scaled to support 10M+ users
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • UIKit
  • Realm

Depop

March 2021 - January 2022

iOS Platform Engineer

Platform team engineer supporting 20+ iOS engineers with tooling and infrastructure. Present during Etsy's $1.6B acquisition.
  • Reduced CI build times from 90+ minutes to ~20 minutes through pipeline optimisation
  • Led migration efforts from UIKit to SwiftUI across the codebase
  • Built testing frameworks and dependency management tooling for the iOS team
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • CI/CD
  • Developer Tooling

Onin

January 2020 - March 2021

Founding iOS Engineer

Sole iOS engineer and founding team member (3 people), joining the co-founder of Muzz.
  • Built the iOS app from scratch including full offline persistence and sync
  • Implemented deep calendar integration using CalDAV protocols
  • Architected real-time chat with offline-first data layer
  • Swift
  • UIKit
  • CalDAV
  • Offline-First

muzmatch

November 2018 - December 2019

iOS Engineer

One of the first iOS hires, growing with the company from 5 to 20+ people and passing 1M members.
  • Built and maintained sync engine for profile swiping functionality
  • Implemented real-time chat using XMPP protocol
  • Built performant UI components with Texture/AsyncDisplayKit
  • Part of major app redesign before departure
  • Swift
  • UIKit
  • XMPP
  • Texture/AsyncDisplayKit

RotaCloud

September 2018 - November 2018

iOS Developer

iOS development for staff scheduling platform.
  • Swift
  • UIKit

Swipe & Tap

July 2017 - September 2018

Junior iOS Developer

Mobile app agency building a variety of client projects as both a supporting and solo engineer.
  • Swift
  • Objective-C
  • UIKit

Technologies

  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • UIKit
  • Rust
  • Elixir
  • TypeScript
  • ClickHouse
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • PlanetScale
  • Realm
  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Phoenix
  • Bazel
  • Tuist
  • Restate
  • Git
  • CI/CD