
Alex Brad
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Alex is a software engineer, hacker, AI breeder, data wrestler, and web app blacksmith. But most of all, he is a problem solver. He thrives on new challenges, whether algorithmic or even the occasional bug-hunting—he likes debugging. With a solid background in machine learning and full-stack engineering, he is currently focusing on the domain of AI applications using LLMs.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Python, JavaScript
The most amazing...
...thing I've built was a price elasticity prediction model for tier 1 airlines based on unstructured web data related to events.
Work Experience
Software Engineer and GPT Specialist
Freelance Clients
- Developed an app that enables the users to upload PDF files and ask questions based on the contents of the file. ChatGPT API was used for this together with Pinecone for embeddings indexing.
- Built a tool for text classification and sentiment analysis using ChatGPT API.
- Developed a counseling chatbot (using ChatGPT API) that helps people see other people's points of view.
Software Engineer
Freelance Clients
- Collected transaction data for cryptocurrencies from various APIs.
- Built automated tools to gather data from social groups related to cryptocurrencies.
- Extracted and processed data from the Ethereum blockchain to understand activity about various smart contracts.
- Analyzed Solidity code to understand various smart contracts better.
- Built and maintained data pipelines to transform and aggregate the gathered data.
- Conducted data analysis to identify the usefulness of data in predicting trading patterns for various cryptocurrencies.
- Developed a web app for complex data exploration and visualization.
- Built predictive models for trading activity in various cryptocurrencies.
- Experimented with algorithmic trading of cryptocurrencies.
Software Engineer
Non-disclosed Hedge Fund
- Researched and identified potential indicators for the economic activity of various companies.
- Built complex automated scraping tools to gather data related to these indicators regularly.
- Created and maintained a custom data pipeline to collect, transform, and aggregate the data related to the indicators.
- Designed and built a modular system where data sources could be easily added or swapped.
- Defined the research workflow and managed two other doing research and scraper implementation.
- Developed a web application for the visualization and interpretation of the gathered data.
- Built an automated system for anomaly detection in the gathered data.
Machine Learning Engineer
Migacore
- Built the infrastructure for collecting structured and unstructured data from the web and social media.
- Used NLP techniques to extract events from unstructured text and understand their importance.
- Created data processing pipelines using Python and Spark.
- Explored, visualized, and cleaned up airline data using Pandas and Matplotlib.
- Developed machine learning models for assessing event importance, predicting travel demand, and price sensitivity.
- Built a web app for showing important events and their impact on travel using React and Redux.
- Deployed data pipelines and web apps on Google Cloud and AWS using Docker and Kubernetes.
- Mentored other developers on full-stack and machine-learning topics.
Full-stack Developer
Freelance
- Designed and implemented a small CMS using Express.js.
- Developed responsive websites using the CMS mentioned above.
- Extracted and processed data from 3rd-party APIs, including Facebook, Google Maps, Eventbrite, and Meetup.
- Scraped websites and processed data about events or places.
- Developed mobile apps using Ionic, Cordova, and Parse.
- Deployed and maintained apps and websites on Parse, AWS, and Heroku.
- Designed, implemented, and interpreted complex analytics using Google Analytics.
- Designed and implemented, in collaboration with an on-site team, several components in a complex web ERP framework built with Angular and .NET.
- Researched and proposed architectural changes for the framework mentioned above.
Front-end Developer
Recognos
- Chose the technology stack and created the architecture for the single-page application developed in Angular.
- Designed and implemented a WYSIWYG blog editor using vanilla JavaScript.
- Designed and implemented a tool for semantically annotating an HTML article.
- Refactored and extended a legacy Knockout.js application.
Co-founder and Developer
Orderick
- Identified financing opportunities and drafted a business plan.
- Pivoted several times to identify the most suitable MVP.
- Researched and employed linked data standards and libraries.
- Extended Backbone.js to build a framework to handle semantic data dynamically.
- Used 3rd-party APIs to gather data and integrate content.
Experience
Automated System for Cryptocurrency Data
Built a React web app for data exploration and visualization involving interactive charts and drill-down workflows. I was the sole developer for the project and led the research, design, and implementation of the end-to-end solution.
Automated Data Gathering System
This involved a lot of research to identify potential indicators and then building automated scrapers to gather that data regularly. This would sometimes involve a lot of complexity because the workflows required to generate data were not straightforward.
The architectural focus of the system was to be very modular, so adding or replacing new data sources would be as straightforward as possible. Additionally, the system included a pipeline for transforming, validating, and aggregating the gathered data.
Initially, I managed the design and building of the system from scratch. Later on, when two additional people were onboarded, I was responsible for defining the research and data-gathering workflow and supervising the work of the two additional team members.
Predicting Travel Demand and Price Sensitivity
In short, our approach involved crawling structured and unstructured data to extract multiple data points related to events. These were later used to understand which events impact travel and what that impact is likely concerning demand and price sensitivity.
Migacore is a small startup, so I was involved in most areas of research and implementation, including:
• Building several scrapers to collect structured and unstructured data from the web.
• Working on the data pipeline that ingested this data, used Named Entity Extraction for isolating events, and assigned additional data points to events.
• Designing and training models to filter down many events to a subset of potentially relevant ones.
• Processing, exploring, and cleaning-up airline data.
• Designing and training models to predict the actual impact of the events on demand and price sensitivity.
• Mentoring other developers.
• Collaborating in building a web app and deploying our models and pipeline in a Kubernetes cluster.
Semantic Travel Blogging
I was in charge of the architecture for the web app and was involved only sparingly in the back-end NLP work. In addition to acting as a usual blogging platform, the app also had to provide tools for manually annotating text, which I built from scratch.
I also created a WYSIWYG web text editor inspired by the one Medium had at the time because none of the existing open-source ones satisfied our requirements.
Skills
Languages
HTML, SCSS, Python, JavaScript, SQL, HTML5, CSS, XML, ECMAScript (ES6), Regex, TypeScript, Java, RDF, Solidity
Frameworks
Scrapy, Redux, Jest, Flask, Angular, Express.js, Bootstrap, Hadoop, Apache Jena, Ionic, Spark, AngularJS, Next.js, Selenium
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Scikit-learn, Pandas, jQuery, React Redux, XGBoost, Node.js, React, NumPy, Matplotlib, Keras, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), TensorFlow, Web3.js
Tools
Git, Jupyter, GitHub, Seaborn, Google Analytics
Paradigms
Unit Testing, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Functional Programming, REST, E2E Testing, ETL, Data Science, Automation
Platforms
Web, Amazon EC2, Linux, Docker, Heroku, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jupyter Notebook, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Blockchain, Ethereum, Firebase
Storage
MongoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redis, Databases, NoSQL, Data Pipelines, AllegroGraph
Other
APIs, Third-party APIs, Front-end, Algorithms, Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Gradient Boosted Trees, Data Engineering, Web Scraping, Full-stack, Scraping, Software Engineering, Web Development, API Integration, Web Crawlers, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, Interactive Charts, GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Cordova, Deep Learning, Ethers.js, Neural Networks, Financial Data, Fintech, Stock Market, Full-stack Development, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), ChatGPT, OpenAI API, Pinecone
Education
Master's Degree in Intelligent Systems
Babes-Bolyai University - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Babes-Bolyai University - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Certifications
Cambridge English | Proficiency (CPE)
Cambridge Assessment English