Founder & Engineer

Alex K.

I build backend systems, email infrastructure, and privacy-first products. I founded VanishInbox after my own inbox got buried in spam from a single free-trial sign-up — and I realised the better option (a disposable address) was far more friction than it needed to be.

VanishInbox is built on Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Email Routing, and Redis — designed from the ground up so that your emails are genuinely deleted after 10 minutes, not just marked as deleted. No account, no PII, no trace.

@Vanish_Inbox About VanishInbox →

Areas of Expertise

Eight+ years building production systems across these disciplines

⚙️

Backend Infrastructure

Designed and operated distributed backend systems handling high-throughput workloads at the edge. Deep experience with serverless architectures, Cloudflare Workers, and optimising cold-start latency for sub-100 ms response times under real traffic.

✉️

Email Routing & Delivery

Built the email pipeline powering VanishInbox — catch-all domain routing via Cloudflare Email Routing, MIME parsing in a Worker, structured storage in Redis with automatic TTL expiry, and sandboxed HTML rendering to block tracking pixels and malicious scripts.

🔒

Privacy Engineering

Designed systems with privacy as a first-class constraint: no PII retention, no IP logging, no behavioural analytics on user content. Familiar with GDPR data-minimisation principles and implementing them at the infrastructure layer rather than just the policy layer.

🛠️

Developer Tooling

Built developer-facing products and internal tooling — from API design to CLI utilities. Comfortable across the full stack (Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind) with a strong preference for boring, maintainable technology over clever abstractions.

☁️

Edge & Serverless

Production experience running workloads on Cloudflare Pages, Workers, and KV. Designed the VanishInbox architecture specifically for edge deployment — no origin server, globally distributed, zero cold-start penalty for inbox polling.

📈

SEO & Growth Engineering

Understands the intersection of technical SEO and product engineering — structured data, Core Web Vitals, crawl budget, and programmatic content at scale. Built VanishInbox's organic growth strategy from zero to consistent non-branded keyword rankings.

Experience Timeline

How I got to building what I build

2016–2018
Early backend work
Started building server-side systems professionally — REST APIs, relational databases, and the basics of distributed architecture. Developed a strong preference for understanding how infrastructure actually works rather than treating it as a black box.
2018–2021
Email infrastructure deep-dive
Spent several years working closely with email delivery systems: SPF/DKIM/DMARC configuration, deliverability tuning, inbound routing pipelines, and large-scale parsing. Developed deep familiarity with the RFCs that most engineers treat as optional reading.
2021–2023
Privacy-first product design
Shifted focus toward building products where privacy was a design constraint rather than an afterthought. Studied GDPR implementation patterns, zero-knowledge architectures, and how to build genuinely private systems — not just compliant ones.
2024
Founded VanishInbox
Combined background in email infrastructure and privacy engineering to build VanishInbox — a free, instant, no-account disposable email service. Chose Cloudflare Workers + Redis for edge performance and automatic data deletion at the infrastructure level.
2025–now
Growing the platform
Expanding VanishInbox with new domains, i18n support, and a content strategy targeting privacy-conscious users. Working toward a Pro tier with extended retention and custom aliases — keeping the free tier genuinely free.