Alex Duarte

Field CTO, Wiz at Google

I get the hardest problems in the room to root cause.

Field CTO at Wiz, now part of Google Cloud, and the last line of technical escalation for Login, RBAC, Projects, Service Catalog, Workflows and Federal across our most strategic customers. I joined before Wiz reached $100M ARR and stayed through $1B and the Google acquisition. Off the clock, I ship production software with coding agents.

Get in touch
How the work connects On the left, the people I work with: CIOs and CISOs, Fortune 50 enterprises, top AI companies, federal agencies, healthcare and financial services. On the right, what I build with: MCP, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini, and a K3s and Argo CD platform. Both connect through me. CIOs and CISOs Fortune 50 Top AI companies Federal and FedRAMP Healthcare Financial services MCP Claude Code Codex Cursor OpenCode Gemini K3s and Argo CD Alex

About

I'm a Field CTO at Wiz, now part of Google Cloud. When one of our most strategic customers hits a problem nobody else has been able to solve in Login & Authentication, RBAC, Projects, Service Catalog, Workflows or Federal, it comes to me. I rebuild their environment, reproduce it, find the root cause, and work with engineering until it's fixed. Then I make sure the product changes so the next customer never sees it.

I joined Wiz in April 2022, before it reached $100M ARR, and have grown with it through every stage since: Cloud Security Architect, team lead, Manager of Technical Account Management for the Northeast Majors region (8 direct reports, 100+ strategic customers), and Field CTO. Along the way Wiz passed $1B in ARR and was acquired by Google for $32B.

My customers include Fortune 50 enterprises, the top AI companies, healthcare, financial services and federal agencies. I administer Wiz's FedRAMP back office, and I speak to CIOs and CISOs at Gartner C-level Communities events. Five so far in the past year.

Outside work I build. Through Xylems Solutions LLC I ship four apps (Beanstalk, QueueCraft, Squish Financial and MFM Tracker), written with coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini) and deployed through a K3s + Argo CD GitOps platform I run at home. QueueCraft exposes an MCP endpoint so agents can pick up their own tickets. That's how I learned what agent-driven development looks like in practice, and what it takes for an enterprise to trust it.

Self-taught, bilingual (English and Spanish), and happiest in the room where the hard problem is.

Experience

Wiz, now part of Google Cloud

Joined April 2022, before Wiz reached $100M ARR. Stayed through $1B+ ARR and Google's $32B acquisition (closed March 2026).

  1. Field CTO: Login & Authentication, RBAC, Projects, Service Catalog, Workflows, Federal

    • Highest point of technical escalation for six platform domains across a rotating book of 8–10 strategic accounts: Fortune 50 enterprises, top AI companies, healthcare, financial services and federal agencies.
    • Rebuild and reproduce complex customer environments, isolate root cause, and drive fixes with product engineering, then bring that field context back to how engineering, product and support prioritize.
    • Helped lead the redesign of the Projects experience and drive the success of the Tenant Manager product, turning field patterns into shipped features and closed gaps.
    • Back-office administrator for Wiz's FedRAMP environment; partner on federal requirements across authentication, access control and tenancy.
    • Speaker at five Gartner C-level Communities executive events in the past year, plus AWS re:Inforce 2025 sessions with the Amazon Cognito and Amazon Neptune teams.

  2. Manager, Technical Account Management, Northeast Majors / Enterprise

    • Led 8 Technical Account Managers covering 100+ strategic customers in the Northeast Majors region.
    • Program-managed account escalations across product, engineering and support to coordinated, on-time resolutions.
    • Built customer success plans with measurable KPIs and reported progress to customers and leadership.
    • Partnered with sales, renewals, operations and marketing on strategic account plans for retention and expansion; recruited, mentored and developed TAMs.

  3. Senior Cloud Security Architect, Majors

    • Team lead for the East Coast Cloud Security Architects and mentor for new hires.
    • Moved to the Majors segment to drive full platform adoption with Wiz's largest customers.
    • Wrote the playbook of common customer technical challenges and how to solve them, used to onboard new architects.

  4. Cloud Security Architect

    • Joined during hypergrowth; resolved customer technical issues with engineering, built custom integrations, and represented customers on roadmap and process.
    • Built risk-mitigation plans with account teams and made sure customers got measurable security outcomes from their deployment.

Xylems Solutions LLC

Founded as Rising Phoenix Services in 2011 (web development, hosting, IT consulting). Now the parent of Rising Phoenix and Xylems.dev, my software studio.

  1. Founder

    • Ship four products written with coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini): Beanstalk, QueueCraft, Squish Financial and MFM Tracker.
    • Built and run the self-hosted K3s and Argo CD GitOps platform they deploy to, including QueueCraft's MCP endpoint that lets agents work their own tickets.

Earlier career

  1. 2019 – 2022

    Director of Computing Operations, NIIMBL

    Led the IT team and owned security, risk and compliance for the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, including NIST SP 800-53 rev 4 and FedRAMP alignment.

  2. 2018 – 2019

    Cloud Support Engineer, Amazon Web Services

    Reproduced customer issues in purpose-built AWS test environments; trained new hires and sat on hiring panels.

  3. 2015 – 2018

    Linux Systems Administrator, Computing Support Specialist, University of Delaware

    Ran a 70+ node research computing cluster for five research groups; earlier led a three-intern help desk for 500 staff.

  4. 2010 – 2019

    IT Manager, Network Support Technician, Fraunhofer USA Center for Molecular Biotechnology

    Grew from technician to IT manager: built the VMware and Hitachi SAN infrastructure and owned the IT budget; returned part-time on contract (2017–2019) to lead vSphere 6.5 and Windows Server 2016 upgrades.

Speaking

What I build on my own time

Four products under Xylems Solutions, written with coding agents and shipped through the platform below.

QueueCraft In daily use

A work tracker built for humans and coding agents. Agents connect over an authenticated MCP endpoint to pick up issues, open branches named after the ticket, post handoff notes, and ask each other for review. Each stored agent has its own budget and run history.

Agents and AI: The MCP server is the product. Claude Code and Codex use it to track every change across my repos.

React, PostgreSQL, MCP (JSON-RPC), WebMCP, TOTP MFA, Capacitor iOS, K3s

Squish Financial Live

A budgeting app for people who want a calm, encouraging view of their money. It syncs bank accounts through Plaid, tracks budgets and goals, and projects where you're headed.

Agents and AI: An AI coach on the Claude API, with the model chosen by plan: Haiku on the free tier, Sonnet on paid plans. It only speaks up when asked.

React, TanStack, Express, Supabase, Plaid, Claude API, Capacitor iOS

Visit squishfinancial.com

Beanstalk Live, web and iOS

A family chores app. Kids earn points, unlock achievements and spend in a prize store the parents stock; parents set recurring chores and approve rewards.

Agents and AI: Built almost entirely with coding agents. Merges to main ship themselves: tests, a Trivy scan that blocks fixable criticals, a GitOps tag bump, an Argo CD sync, then an iOS over-the-air bundle published only after the new API reports its commit.

TypeScript, Turborepo, Express, PostgreSQL, Capacitor iOS, CircleCI, Argo CD

MFM Tracker Live

A tracker for high-risk pregnancies. Log blood pressure readings and timed kick counts, get clear guidance when a session comes up short, and send your maternal-fetal medicine team a weekly report you've reviewed first.

Agents and AI: Built with agents for my own family, with MFA and a report the patient reviews before anything reaches a clinician.

Node, PostgreSQL, PWA, MFA

Visit babytracker.xylems.dev

The platform they run on

Everything above runs on a single-node K3s cluster at home, declared in one Git repository and reconciled by Argo CD. No one runs kubectl apply.

  1. Push

    An agent or I open a PR named after its QueueCraft ticket.

  2. Build

    Self-hosted CircleCI runners inside the cluster build the image; gitleaks, kubeconform and yamllint gate the manifests.

  3. Scan

    Trivy scans the image and blocks the release on fixable critical CVEs.

  4. Publish

    The image goes to GitHub Container Registry and CI commits the new tag to the GitOps repo.

  5. Sync

    Argo CD (app of apps) sees the change and rolls it out to K3s.

  6. Verify

    Health checks confirm the running commit before mobile bundles publish; Gatus and Prometheus alert if anything drifts.

Cluster
K3s on Unraid, bootstrapped with Terraform; MetalLB, Traefik, NVIDIA GPU device plugin
Delivery
Argo CD app-of-apps, Argo CD Image Updater, CircleCI self-hosted runners, GHCR
Secrets
Self-hosted Infisical with the Kubernetes operator; SOPS + age via ksops
Edge
cert-manager with Let's Encrypt, external-dns, Pi-hole, Traefik ACLs
Observability
Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, Loki, Grafana Alloy, Gatus
Data and automation
PostgreSQL 18, n8n with a custom Python runner and Ollama nodes

Next: a Mac Studio inference node for local models, with an open-source agent harness, a private Siri app over Tailscale, and room-aware Home Assistant voice satellites.

AI toolchain

I use all of these most days. Each one has a job.

ToolHow I use it
Claude CodeMy primary agent for multi-repo work: planning, refactors, CI and deploy scripts, with CLAUDE.md files and project memory in each repo.
CodexParallel tasks and second opinions; QueueCraft's first agent integration was built for it.
CursorIn-editor work when I want to drive the change myself, line by line.
OpenCodeOpen-source harness I use to compare models side by side, and the base for my local-model setup.
Gemini and Vertex AILong-context reading and Google Cloud work; Vertex AI for model access inside GCP.
Claude APIProduction inference in Squish Financial, with the model chosen by plan.
MCPI build MCP servers (QueueCraft, a Vikunja bridge) so agents can act on real systems with scoped tokens.
Local modelsOllama in n8n automations today; a dedicated Apple Silicon inference node next.

Skills

AI engineering
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini, Vertex AI, Claude API, MCP servers, Ollama
Security
Cloud security (CNAPP, CSPM), Identity and SSO (SAML, OIDC, SCIM), RBAC and multi-tenancy, FedRAMP, NIST SP 800-53, Vulnerability management
Cloud and platform
AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Kubernetes (K3s), Argo CD, Terraform, Docker, CircleCI
Build
TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, PHP, Bash
Field leadership
Executive briefings, Technical escalations, Customer-to-roadmap advocacy, Team leadership

Education

  • Delaware Technical Community College
    Computer Information Systems coursework, 2011 – 2012
  • St. Georges Technical High School
    Web and Print Technology, 2007 – 2011

Certifications

  • Wiz Certified Cloud Fundamentals
    Wiz, 2025

Languages

  • English (native)
  • Spanish (native)

Contact

Hiring for a Field CTO, want a speaker, or comparing notes on agents in the enterprise? Send a message and I'll reply by email.

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