Alex Mutwiri Mbuturah

Vancouver, BC

Alex Mutwiri Mbuturah

Software Engineer at Apple App Store

I build the systems other engineers build on. These days that means the App Store at Apple — the APIs developers use to price their apps, sell in-app purchases and offers, and get set up and shipped.

About

I'm a backend and infrastructure engineer. Most of my career has been spent on developer-facing platforms and the unglamorous machinery underneath them: API design, build and test scheduling, CI pipelines, telemetry, load testing, and ML training infrastructure. If other engineers depend on it and someone gets paged when it breaks, I've probably worked on something like it.

I've been at Apple since 2022 — first on Xcode Cloud, and since 2026 on the App Store. Before that I was at NVIDIA on the Isaac robotics infrastructure team, and before that I interned twice at Dropbox. I studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where I also spent a year teaching it.

When I'm not working, I'm usually somewhere well past the end of the pavement.

  • API design
  • Python
  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • Scala
  • Go
  • JavaScript
  • Ruby
  • C++
  • Rust
  • Distributed systems
  • Databases
  • CI/CD
  • Developer platforms

Experience

  1. Apple Now

    Software Engineer, App Store

    I work on the APIs behind the App Store — the interfaces developers use to run their business: pricing and availability, in-app purchases, subscriptions, offers, and app setup and metadata. Put simply, these are the APIs developers use to distribute and monetize their apps. The App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025.

    • Pricing
    • Subscriptions
    • App Store
  2. Apple

    Software Engineer, Developer Tools

    Designed, built and ran services behind Xcode Cloud, Apple's CI/CD service for App Store developers. Led features including code coverage, Mac app notarization, Swift Testing support, and a rebuilt bug-reporting flow, and helped maintain the infrastructure that schedules builds and tests across a large fleet of machines.

    • CI/CD
    • Distributed systems
    • Developer tools
  3. NVIDIA

    Software Engineer, Isaac Robotics Infrastructure

    Built pipeline infrastructure for training machine learning models for robotics and autonomous vehicles — coordinating, scheduling, executing and reporting on large batch training jobs, so researchers stopped launching and babysitting them by hand.

    • ML infrastructure
    • Batch pipelines
    • Robotics
  4. Dropbox

    Software Engineering Intern, Infrastructure

    Built a load-testing service supporting scheduled and on-demand runs. It fed server capacity planning and let teams catch performance regressions during development instead of in production.

    • Load testing
    • Capacity planning
  5. Dropbox

    Software Engineering Intern, Desktop Sync Engine

    Built a remote telemetry service for the Dropbox desktop app, making file sync and recovery faster and safer to diagnose — and shorter to talk through on a support call.

    • Telemetry
    • Desktop sync

Teaching

  1. Teaching Assistant — Software Engineering (CS169)

    UC Berkeley, School of Engineering

    Selected from top performers to design course projects and lead sections for 300+ students, under Professors Armando Fox and Michael Ball.

  2. Academic Intern — Data Structures (CS61BL)

    UC Berkeley, School of Engineering

    Prepared lab material and tutored students in the lab-centred summer offering of the data structures course, serving over 500 students.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Bachelors in Computer Science

2016 — 2020 · Berkeley, CA

MasterCard Foundation Scholar. Taught CS169 (Software Engineering) and CS61BL (Data Structures).

Awards

  • Dropbox Intern Hack Week — Grand Prize

    2019

    First place out of 30 projects built by 80 interns.

  • MasterCard Foundation Scholarship, UC Berkeley

    2016 — 2020

    Full-ride four-year undergraduate scholarship, awarded from a pool of hundreds of applicants across Africa.

Overlanding

Weekends are for the trail. I overland out of Vancouver — building out the rig, airing down, and camping wherever the track runs out. Forest service roads, alpine passes, and the occasional recovery.

The build and the trips live at @WagonOverland.

@WagonOverland