Alexandre Bertails

Highlights

I turn an organization's data into shared meaning that people and machines can both use, and I lead the engineering that makes it work at scale. I helped write RDF standards at the W3C, then applied them to enterprise knowledge graphs at Apple and Netflix, and lately to grounding AI agents in trusted, governed semantic facts.

• I lead an engineering team and set technical direction across the organization, growing engineers while staying hands-on in the design.
• A full-stack platform engineer: I build the capabilities other teams rely on, from knowledge graphs and APIs down to the data and transactional systems beneath them. Nearly two decades writing production code, primarily Scala and Java, with deep roots in functional programming and distributed systems.
• A frequent conference speaker and invited podcast guest, comfortable with senior leadership and non-technical partners.

Professional experience

Jan 2022 -
ongoing

Netflix • Los Gatos, CA

Tech Lead Manager - Knowledge Foundations, Content Engineering (Dec 2023 - ongoing)

I lead the UDA (Unified Data Architecture) team, which makes Netflix's data semantically interoperable. UDA is Netflix's enterprise knowledge graph, holding the company's semantics as data: the domain models and their concepts, the data containers (a schema plus the coordinates locating its instance data), and the mappings between them. It is queryable data, so humans and AI agents alike discover and act on these facts.

• Co-designed Upper, the domain modeling language for UDA and its semantically preserving projections to GraphQL, Avro, Iceberg, Java, and SHACL.
• Driving adoption across business domains: hundreds of registered domain models, UDA-first Java applications, and an improved onboarding experience.
• Co-designed a conversational agent (and command-line tools) that brings semantic modeling to domain experts without a semantic background.

Senior+ Software Engineer - Data Platform (Jan 2022 - Dec 2023)

Led the effort to federate the Netflix Data Platform's micro-services into the Enterprise GraphQL gateway, unifying the platform's API and search experience; the Data Platform's go-to GraphQL expert.

• Owned the domain graph services for the workflow orchestration and notebooks platforms, and federated them into the Enterprise GraphQL gateway.
• Maintained the GraphQL Search service for the Data Platform.

Apr 2015 -
Jan 2022

Apple • Cupertino, CA

Software Engineering Manager - Apple Media Products (Jan 2020 - Jan 2022)

Led the engineering team building the platform for AMP (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Podcast, …) to move its legacy infrastructure to Kubernetes across multiple clouds. Also managed secrets and identity services.

Senior Data Engineer - Fraud Engineering, Algorithms, Risk (Sep 2017 - Jan 2020)

Data engineer supporting data scientists through better tooling.

• Maintained our timeseries library for aggregating data in streaming+batch jobs, and for querying models in realtime services.
• Reduced time-to-market for onboarding new Spark jobs from days to minutes.
• Built highly scalable regex-based filtering engine for Spark.
• Implemented GDPR requirements for Fraud's infrastructure.

Staff Engineer - Marcom (Apr 2015 - Sep 2017)

Involved in everything data for apple.com in Apple’s Worldwide Marketing Communications. Single-handedly and dramatically improved apple.com's SEO posture.

• Strategized, built, and deployed Apple's Knowledge Graph at enterprise scale: apple.com's content as structured data, using the Schema.org ontology and W3C Linked Data principles.
• Oversaw various content management systems and publishing pipelines for the marketing and retail organizations.
• Architected and delivered Today at Apple.
• Joined and represented Apple's interests in the Schema.org Community Group.

Mar 2014 -
Feb 2015

Pellucid Analytics • New York, NY

Pellucid makes a tablet- and browser-based software solution for data visualizations.

Senior Software Engineer

Started on the data team and later moved to the visualization team.

• Designed a graph-based query language and API on top of Datomic using the Linked Data Platform and banana-rdf.
• Implemented the Grammar of Graphics as a DSL in Scala.
• Editor for the W3C Linked Data Patch Format as part of the Linked Data Platform (LDP).

Jul 2009 -
Feb 2014

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) • Cambridge, MA

The W3C is the international consortium that develops the open standards underpinning the Web.

Senior Software Engineer

Mentored by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, I helped shape several RDF and Linked Data standards, the foundation of his Semantic Web vision, steering a federated community of contributors toward consensus specifications. As part of the W3C Systems Team, I also led the development of a unified platform for the W3C validators.

• Editor of the W3C Recommendation RDB2RDF - Direct Mapping; team contact for the RDB2RDF and Linked Data Platform working groups.
• Created banana-rdf, a library for RDF in Scala, and read-write-web, a pre-Solid server for personal data.
• Maintained w3.org and various services as the W3C Webmaster.

May 2008 -
Jul 2009

Atos - Open Source Center • Paris, France

Atos is an international IT services company.

Software Engineer

I worked for the French National Library on their digital library and preservation project SPAR, in Java with Apache Jena, modeling its data from XML to RDF and querying it with SPARQL on Virtuoso.

Sep 2007 -
Apr 2008

Entropic-Synergies • Paris, France

Entropic-Synergies is a web-agency specialized in social games.

Software Engineer

Implemented white-label products to be licensed to various Websites: browser games built with J2EE and Adobe Flex, e-learning platforms, and search engines with data scraping, including a real-time stock-market game for LeFigaro.fr.

Mar 2006 -
Sep 2007

INRIA • Saclay, France

INRIA is the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control.

PhD candidate

I was researching certified compilers and formal semantics for synchronous languages à la Lustre using the Coq proof assistant, and also taught computer science and networks at Telecom ParisTech and the University of Paris.

Education

2006

MSc in Computer Engineering at Telecom ParisTech • Paris, France

2006

MSc in Computer Science at MPRI - University Paris VII • Paris, France

2003

BSc in Computer Science at University Paris VII (ranked 1st) • Paris, France

Language proficiency

French

native

English

fluent