Developer Relations at Dremio (2021 to Present)

In that role he leads community education and technical evangelism around Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, and open data lakehouse architecture. He received the 2025 Dremio CEO Award for his contributions to the company and its ecosystem.

Speaking

He speaks at data and developer conferences around the world, including:

• Data Day Texas 2024, as a speaker and in the O'Reilly Author Showcase
• Dremio Subsurface, several times as a speaker and host
• OSA Con 2023 ("Data as Code: Project Nessie") and 2024 ("Open Source and the Data Lakehouse")
• SQLBits ("Apache Iceberg Data Analytics with Python")
• Iceberg Summit 2025 and 2026
• Data Council, Confluent Current, DataEngBytes, ODSC AI East, P99 Conf, Nerdearla in Argentina, and Øredev in Sweden

Talk topics and booking are on alexmerced.com/speaking.

Courses and bylines

His LinkedIn Learning course, Hands-On with Apache Iceberg, launched in October 2024. He writes regularly for the Dremio blog, and in 2025 he wrote bylined pieces for Cloud Data Insights (on a year of Apache Polaris, and on the semantic layer), DATAVERSITY (on semantic search and AI), and BigDATAwire ("5 Tips to Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse", October 2025).

Podcasts and press

• 2023: The Data Stack Show, "The Anatomy of a Data Lakehouse"
• 2024: Data Engineering Podcast, "Version Your Data Lakehouse Like Your Software With Nessie"
• 2024: Let's Talk AI, episode 70, on his path from finance to data engineering
• 2024: RTInsights Smart Talk, episode 9, on Apache Iceberg and streaming
• 2024: quoted by SiliconANGLE and Runtime on how the open table formats compare
• 2025: one of the expert predictions in SD Times' look at software development in 2025

He also hosts three podcasts of his own, listed on the homepage. The books from these years have their own chapter.