Alex Polvi: Council of Outstanding Early Career Engineers - 2012

Director of Bay Area OperationsRackspace | San Francisco, Calif.

As one of the College of Engineering’s youngest recipients of an Oregon Stater Award, Alex Polvi has packed a lot into a quarter of a century. His work as one of the founders of the Open Source Education Lab on campus helped garner Polvi coveted internships and jobs after graduation.

“The Open Source Lab was by far the most valuable part of my experience at Oregon State,” says Polvi. “It just really set my career up for all sorts of things — Mozilla, Firefox, Google.”But Polvi wasn’t satisfied to work with some of the world’s largest search engine companies. In December 2008, he and two fellow Oregon State graduates (with help from Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator) launched Cloudkick, an Internet cloud server management and monitoring system. In less than a year, the company had grown to 12 employees, half of which were Oregon State graduates. After two years, the company was acquired by Rackspace, one of the nation’s top players in cloud computing.“

Job creation was definitely the most satisfying element of my work on Cloudkick,” says Polvi. “After starting a company, we created dozens of jobs and hired a ton of OSU grads along the way.”