Alexis Christoforides


Software engineer & consultant · Boston, MA

I work on operating systems, language runtimes, embedded hardware, developer tooling, and scientific data analysis software.

Over the past fifteen years I've done this at Wilderness Labs, Microsoft, Xamarin, and TGen. I take on a small number of contract engagements each year, please reach out if you think I can work for you.

Resume (PDF)

Meadow.OS — a .NET operating system for microcontrollers

Wilderness Labs · 2020 – Present

Problem Wilderness Labs set out to let developers build secure, connected device firmware in C# and .NET — on microcontrollers with a few dozen megabytes of RAM and flash, a class of hardware normally programmed in C.

What I did Led OS engineering for Meadow. I ported the Mono runtime to STM32 hardware on the NuttX RTOS, integrated mbedTLS for device TLS, designed the full-system over-the-air update machinery — from custom bootloader to MQTT delivery — co-designed the .NET low-level I/O API (GPIO, SPI, I²C, interrupts), ported TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers with .NET bindings, and ran the OS release process.

Outcome A production embedded operating system shipping on commercial hardware: developers write, monitor, and remotely update device applications entirely in .NET.

Mono — runtime engineering for cross-platform .NET

Xamarin & Microsoft · 2014 – 2020

Problem Mono was the open-source .NET runtime underneath every Xamarin iOS and Android app. Garbage-collector behavior, runtime reliability, and the release pipeline behind a >1 GB macOS SDK needed sustained core-team work.

What I did Improved the SGen generational garbage collector, hardened the runtime's native crash-reporting machinery, ported file and network I/O subsystems from Microsoft's CoreFX, maintained bockbuild — the build and packaging system behind the Mono macOS SDK — and integrated runtime releases into the Xamarin products.

Outcome Runtime and tooling releases shipped continuously to Xamarin's developer base, through the Microsoft acquisition and beyond.

Seurat — finding cancer mutations in genome pairs

TGen · 2009 – 2014

Problem Detecting somatic mutations means comparing a patient's tumor and normal genomes at whole-genome scale — with early-generation sequencing noise, as much a statistics problem as a software one.

What I did Designed a Bayesian method for tumor/normal comparison and wrote Seurat, its open-source implementation (first-author paper, BMC Genomics). Helped design and operate TGen's HPC cancer-genomics pipelines, and contributed to the pilot phase of the 1000 Genomes Project.

Outcome Co-author on 41+ peer-reviewed papers cited over 11,000 times; the 1000 Genomes dataset became the reference map of human genetic variation for hundreds of subsequent studies.

Embedded & IoT systems
Hardware bringup, RTOS integration, hardware abstraction layers, OTA update infrastructure, and running managed runtimes on constrained hardware.
Runtime & platform engineering
.NET and Mono runtime internals: JIT/AOT compilation, garbage collection, interop layers, and porting managed code to new platforms.
Developer tooling & build systems
Build infrastructure, cross-platform packaging, and CI/CD for complex native projects.
Scientific computing & bioinformatics
Genomics pipelines, sequencing data analysis, and statistical methods for large scientific datasets.
2020 – Present Boston, MA

Meadow.OS Team Engineering Lead

Wilderness Labs

Leading OS engineering for a production embedded operating system that brings .NET to microcontrollers.

2014 – 2020 Boston, MA

Mono Runtime Engineer

Xamarin, then Microsoft via the 2016 acquisition

Core team on the open-source .NET runtime powering Xamarin: garbage collection, runtime reliability, and macOS SDK release engineering.

2009 – 2014 Phoenix, AZ

Bioinformatician & Software Engineer

Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen)

Cancer-genomics pipelines, somatic mutation detection methods, and the 1000 Genomes Project.