Work Experience

September 2023 - Present

Founding/Senior Software Engineer Ventrilo.AI
Menlo Park, USA
Stealth Mode

August 2019 – September 2023

Staff Software Engineer Indeed, Inc.
San Francisco, USA
Responsibilities:
  • Creating knowledge base using AI toolchain (embeddings, gpt) for internal engineering organization (OpenAI, LangChain, LlamaIndex)
  • Building API platform based on GraphQL, Apollo Federation, and Service Mesh / Envoy (TypeScript, Gradle, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, AWS, Terraform, Spark, Java, Kotlin, Rust)
  • Leading team of contractors to create a new backend service, fully integrated with existing systems to provide new capabilities on employer portal (Java, Kotlin, Gradle)
  • Implementing new and adjusting existing client-facing products for enterprise clients on employer portal for better content management over job postings, ads campaigns, and candidates messaging (Java SE/EE, Kotlin, JavaScript, React, Python)
Key accomplishments:
  • Built a chatbot (standalone and Slack integrations) to address internal customer requests
    • Indexed thousands of Confluence pages, Google documents, emails, and Slack threads using OpenAI embeddings
    • Using LangChain preparing prompts for GPT-4 to generate answers with references to relevant resources
    • Currently improving performance with migrating to the LlamaIndex stack
  • Contributing to GraphQL Gateway internal platform
    • Supported migration and onboarding of 250 services to GraphQL stack and over 1000 API clients
    • Led continuous performance evaluation and improvements, currently able to support billions of daily requests and 40,000 peak RPS with over 600 globally distributed nodes
    • Co-piloted staged intricate migration to Apollo Federation version 2
  • Personally led migration to a new API Gateway product vendor (from Apigee Edge to Cloudflare)
    • Conducted feature research for all available solutions on the market
    • Prototyped solutions and performed performance and load testing
    • Participated in contract negotiations
    • Built end-to-end logging infrastructure
    • Resulted in $1M (80%) annual cost savings, improved reliability and performance metrics, and richer telemetry
  • Created important components designs
    • Data durability contracts (similar to Microsoft) fitting company’s environment
    • Client fine-grained authorization system leveraging GraphQL DSL, OAuth, and Open Policy Agent’s authorization DSL
  • Contributing to various engineering organization initiatives
    • Participating in software/API design reviews
    • Multiple guilds membership: Java, API, GraphQL, Software Design
    • Outage investigations, mitigations, and postmortems
    • Establishing SWE practices in new teams: code / design reviews, knowledge sharing
    • Conducted over 300 technical interviews for SWE/TDM candidates: problem solving, system design, and code review
    • Innovating in automatically generated code capabilities - Open API specifications, system monitoring, SDKs
  • Mentoring experience
    • Immediate team members as well as junior and senior engineers within organization
    • Interns, including Ada Academy graduates

August 2015 – August 2019

Software Engineer Indeed, Inc.
Senior Software Engineer (since February 2017) Indeed, Inc.
Staff Software Engineer (since February 2019) Indeed, Inc.
Tokyo, Japan
Responsibilities:
  • Supporting and delivering new features to web crawler ecosystem for aggregating job postings from all over the Internet (Java SE/EE, JavaScript, Python)
  • Improving automatic crawler rules repair tooling using heuristics and machine learning
Key accomplishments:
  • Personally delivered crowdsourcing platform for human intelligence tasks
    • Collecting requirements, communicating with stakeholders
    • Holding system design review, prototyping, and writing documentation
    • Releasing it to the clients, onboarding new engineers
    • Resulted in reduction of thousands of hours saved, hundreds of thousands tasks completed, assisting in bringing over $10M in new customers LTV
  • Supporting migration of crawling infrastructure to industry standard web browsers using Selenium and Selenium Grid (clustering solution)
  • Preparing and consolidate data from various storages and services to enable data scientists to experiment and come up with ideas of fully automating aggregation pipeline
  • Personal project of leveraging publicwww.com dataset for building websites classifier to generate leads for discovery system in the crawler, resulted in 750k positively identified websites
  • Participating as an engineering lead in Indeed University 2017, internal startup incubator program to on-board new engineers and generate/test new ideas for business, acted as an interim manager for a cohort of 5 people
  • Mentoring interns and junior team members, hosting internal tech talks and workshops about build tools, testability, web app technologies, conducting technical interviews for SWE/TDM candidates

May 2014 — July 2015

Software Engineer Yandex LLC
Moscow, Russia
Responsibilities:
  • Developing and supporting web analytics tool Yandex.Metrica (Java SE/EE)
Key accomplishments:
  • Whole support of API component, introducing new reports functionality
  • Working closely with data backend counterpart team, contributing small fixes to now open source project ClickHouse
  • Working closely with QA automation engineers to create automated regression testing of all documented API endpoints based on automatically generated JSON schemas
  • Setting up thorough stress / load testing of beta versions before deployment, leveraging Yandex.Tank internal cluster
  • Identifying bottlenecks, resolving performance issues, optimizing ClickHouse SQL queries

May 2013 — April 2014

Software Engineer Mail.Ru Games
Moscow, Russia
Responsibilities:
  • Developing and supporting game mechanics of MMORPG “Allods Online” (Java SE, C++)
Key accomplishments:
  • Developed several new game mechanics (abilities tied to distance between coupled in-game objects)
  • Fixed client reported visual bugs which were in game for years (C++, Lua)
  • Identified a bug with texture mapping for multiple matrix operations, causing numeric precision loss, fixed with simplifying to a single matrix multiplication
  • Built unit testing harness for brand new project based on Unity Engine

September 2012 — May 2013

Software Engineer Mail.Ru Group
Moscow, Russia
Responsibilities:
  • Developing and supporting site http://kino.mail.ru (previously http://afisha.mail.ru) about media, social events, and entertainment (Perl, MySQL)
  • Developing import tool to load data from info providers (ticket purchases, showtimes, video content streaming)
Key accomplishments:
  • Content variety expansion via adding support of new informational partners
  • Led enablement of video streaming capabilities
  • Updated movies and TV shows overall rating calculation
  • Improved performance of batch import processing from hours to minutes

October 2009 — August 2012 (during attending university up to February 2012)

Software Engineer GE Money Bank Russia Center of Excellence, Mirantis, Inc.
Saratov, Russia
Responsibilities:
  • Developing and supporting helpdesk based on OTRS (Perl, MySQL)
  • Improving banking daily batch processing processing utility (Perl)
Key accomplishments:
  • Created a custom events driven email sending system
  • Added new functionality for automatic ticket resolution from shortcut links in email notifications
  • Performed MySQL version updates and schema management
  • Sped up batch processing utility to satisfy hard time constraints with multi fold increase in daily data volume

Education

Specialist (it's like MS) in Mathematics

Computer Security and Cryptography Department

Computer Science and Informational Technologies Faculty

Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia

Graduated in 2012

Certifications / Lifelong Learning

Deep Learning Specialization Andrew Ng

Machine Learning with Python IBM

Scalable Machine Learning on Big Data using Apache Spark IBM


Algorithms, Part I Princeton University

Algorithms, Part II Princeton University

Kotlin for Java Developers JetBrains

Functional Programming Principles in Scala Martin Odersky

Functional Program Design in Scala Martin Odersky


Blockchain Specialization University at Buffalo & The State University of New York

Decentralized Finance (DeFi): The Future of Finance Specialization Duke University

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Princeton University

Blockchain and Money: MIT 15.S12, Fall 2018 MIT OpenCourseWare

Contact Information / CV

CV / Resume
alexlopashev@gmail.com