Alex Woods

Alex Woods

Software Engineering Leader

Talent Profile

Versatile and accomplished software developer and engineering leader with over 10 years of experience in delivering high-quality software solutions across a wide range of domains and platforms. Experienced in backend service development, full-stack web development and machine learning/data pipelines. Proven track record of leading and managing software teams, defining and executing technology roadmaps, collaborating with product and business stakeholders, ensuring security and privacy standards, and advancing product strategy. Passionate about solving complex problems, learning new technologies, and growing as a leader.

Key Skills

    Backend:
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Java
  • Spring MVC
  • SOA/microservices
  • REST API Design
    Frontend:
  • React
  • Redux
  • Typescript
    Database:
  • SQL: Oralce, Postgre
  • No-SQL: dynamodb, mongodb
  • Hibernate
  • ActiveRecord
    Machline Learning/Data mining:
  • R
  • Python
  • Scala
  • Spark, EMR
  • MPI
  • CUDA

Work Experience

AWS SDKs and Tools

Tech Lead

2020-Present

  • developed and maintained code generation to translate api definitions into SDKs for 220+ AWS services.
  • developed Ruby specific sdk customizations
  • owned 1p gems including AWS record, rails provisoner, sdk rails - to provide ruby idiomatic abstractions on top of the sdk.
  • contributed to AWS sdk and tools build and release infrastructure.
  • api bar raiser - review new AWS APIs and updates to existing services.
  • used github issues and requests, sdk usage metrics, and developer surveys to develop 2 year roadmap for the ruby SDK.

Amazon - Kindle

Software Development Manager

2019

  • Managed a team of 9 software engineers to develop machine learning driven content, recommendations and marketing programs.
  • Develop infrastructure to support research scientists and productionalize models
  • Develop and maintain datalake and data pipelines using EMR/spark, redshift, and AWS Glue.
  • Launched Book Notification Center - added recommendations and notifications to retail web for physical and digital book store pages.

Amazon - Global Leadership Development

Software Development Manager

2017-2019

  • Managed team of 4 engineers building internal, global tools for onboarding with personalized, location aware content catalog
  • Launched globaly, Amazon wide to new hires in 44 countries and 66 roles with 75% adoption
  • Worked closely with business stakeholders across the company to develop requirements
  • Completed review with legal counsel for all countries with corporate offices including GDPR compliance
  • Developed estimates and project timelines. Managed project technical risks
  • Led design, development and delivery of web tools using SpringMVC, Ruby on Rails and React.JS
  • Data modeling for PostgreSQL and DynamoDB
  • Established effective processes for ongoing support and operational excellence
  • Collaborated with multiple org BI teams to deliver actionable business metrics and analytics

Amazon - Alexa Experience and Devices

Software Development Engineer

2015-2017

  • Built machine learning systems to detect our customers’ interests, identify and rank trends, and create Summarizations from large datasets.
  • Developed trend detection and ingestion pipeline using python, Stanford NLU libraries (java), Scala and Spark.
  • Designed and developed multiple back end services to support new device experiences
  • Technical lead and point of contact for project
  • Performed interviews and recruiting – helped broader team grow from 3 to over 15 engineers

Amazon - Subscribe and Save

Software Development Engineer

2014-2015

  • Developed backend service for recurring orders supporting millions of international customers and more than 15 million subscriptions
  • Supported launch of SnS program in India and Tiered in Japan.
  • Design and development on significant project to migrate from Oracle to DynamoDB and break legacy monolithic service into microservices built in Java and Spring.
  • Worked across many teams to onboard multiple programs on our platform
  • Provided operational support for service

Northfield Trading LP

Software Engineer and Research Analyst

2010-2014

  • Developed infrastructure and algorithms to automatically trade Futures contracts in 40+ global markets.
  • Designed and developed software infrastructure to support rapid testing of new methods and quick deployment into live trading
  • Applied a wide array of machine learning methods to the development of new trading systems using a robust, structured research process
  • Developed desktop and web based tools and reports for visualizing, analyzing and exploring large amounts of market data, online system performance, and research results
  • Use MongoDB to build scalable and flexible experiment meta-parameter library
  • Used R, MPI, CUDA, NFS, Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Slurm to build a scalable, high performance system to support research and trading
  • Integrated modern software engineering processes into the teams work flow such as version control, packages, automated testing, OO and functional design patterns.
  • Improved existing trading algorithms and performed independent research on new systems.
  • Optimized performance of critical code and created suite of customized profiling tools

Medical Simulations Corporation

Software Engineer

2009-2010

  • Worked on a variety of tasks including hardware IO, haptics, internal libraries, system verification tools, infrastructure, simulation logic, and user interfaces
  • Designed and developed new IO systems to handle serial communication with a DSP.
  • Ported IO systems from C# into C++.
  • Designed and developed suite of tools to verify hardware setup and functionality and diagnose problems.
  • Designed and implemented Haptics API
  • Used Haptics API to develop haptic effects for multiple simulations based on clinical requirements
  • Collaborated with clients and doctors to tune Haptic effects
  • Developed infrastructure to move simulation UIs from MFC to QT

University of Duisburg-Essen

Summer Intern through DAAD RISE

2008

  • Developed software for the design of roller coasters in an augmented reality environment using a tracked head mounted display, pen, and panel
  • B-SPLINE based modeling of roller coaster path combined with proprietary physics simulation
  • Developed software to simulate a roller coaster ride in a virtual reality environment.
  • Software was developed using C++ and Open Inventor (OpenGL scene graph manager)
  • Created German/English documentation

Laboratory For Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP)

Undergraduate Research Assistant

2007-2008

  • Wrote Java/JDBC framework for developing GUI database tools
  • Developed a number of tools for common administrative and data management tasks using my framework
  • Wrote cross platform makefiles for database access library for IDL

Education

University of Colorado

B.S. Computer Science GPA: 3.98

Graduated: May 2009

Dean’s list, Graduated Summa Cum Laude. Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society