Meet the founder

Alex is a licensed marine engineer, former U.S. Navy Reserve officer, and self-taught software developer — a unique intersection of skills in one of the oldest, most traditional industries on Earth. He spent more than five years sailing on commercial vessels and running operations at The Vane Brothers Company, and built the leading U.S. Coast Guard exam prep platform along the way.

The maritime career

Alex started in the maritime industry when he was just 15 — painting a water barge on the docks for The Vane Brothers Company in Baltimore, Maryland. The next year, he moved into their mechanic shop, rebuilding John Deere diesel engines. By 17, he was out on Vane Brothers tugs and barges — spending his summers in New York Harbor as a deckhand on a 4,200-horsepower towing vessel pushing a 50,000-barrel barge. The following year, he earned his Tankerman Person-In-Charge endorsement, loading and discharging dangerous liquid cargoes before he could legally drink.

At 18, he headed to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. He was elected Class President, sailed on commercial and Military Sealift Command vessels around the world, and delivered the commencement address for the Class of 2017.

After graduating with a B.S. in Marine Engineering, Alex began a five-year MARAD sailing obligation, shipping out with AMO as an engineer on tankers. From there he returned to his roots at Vane Brothers — sailing on their fleet while stepping into management ashore in his off time. As the company expanded to Seattle, he came on as vessel supervisor and spent over three years helping build the operation, still sailing along the way. He later moved to New York Harbor as a fleet supervisor — bouncing between the engine room and the office for years, with Sea Trials growing alongside the whole time.

Building Sea Trials

A year into his sailing obligation, on a tanker in 2018, Alex was reminiscing about the convoluted slog of studying for the very license he was now sailing on — and realized USCG exam prep hadn’t moved in decades. Outdated books, zero feedback, no analytics. The moment he stepped off the ship, he started teaching himself to code and built the first iteration of Sea Trials, shipping it while still sailing full-time.

From there he picked up web, then Android, then full-stack development. Today Sea Trials runs natively on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and web — with the kind of cross-device sync and offline-first architecture most apps don’t even attempt. In an industry as old as maritime, where ships routinely lose connectivity for days at a time, that piece is non-negotiable — and every layer of it is custom-engineered into a single codebase.

For five years he ran the entire platform solo — development, design, customer support, analytics, everything — while maintaining a full-time maritime career. Sea Trials grew from zero to more than 50,000 mariners with an average 4.8-star rating across every app store.

In 2023, Sea Trials shipped one of the first AI tutors built specifically for the USCG exam — more than a chatbot, a foundation model grounded in the USCG question bank, the CFRs, and the regulations behind every answer. That same year, Alex stepped off the boats to focus on Sea Trials full-time.

Today

Sea Trials runs as a fully custom-built product platform — every layer engineered in-house, no off-the-shelf course software stitched together underneath. It was built from the ground up for a single purpose: serving a market whose problems demand unique solutions — offline-first storage, real cross-device sync, and a native experience on every device a mariner might pick up, from a tablet on the bridge to a desktop at home to a browser on shore.

Underneath it all is a custom CI/CD pipeline that ships updates and builds for the App Store, Google Play, the Microsoft Store, macOS, and the web in a single flow, on top of a backend engineered to keep every device in step. Alex now leads a team of engineers and oversees the full product lifecycle, from architecture decisions to App Store releases.