Alexander is available for hire
Hire AlexanderAlexander Price
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Location
San Francisco, United States
Toptal Member Since
November 23, 2018
Since 2013, Alexander has been in the software development field. He has about 20 apps in production with over 100 million monthly users, and most recently, he led and built Plex Banking by Google. He is highly technical but also able to lead teams. Alexander is perfect for consulting on designing systems and advising on organizing your organization or for independent projects.
Portfolio
Google
Hibernate, HTTP, RPC, Jobs, Batch, Distributed Systems, SQL, Java, JavaScript...
Affirm
Luigi, Celery, gRPC, MessagePack, Redux, React, JavaScript, SQLAlchemy, Flask...
Terrain Digital
Redis, DYNAMO, Koa, Express.js, MongoDB, MySQL, PHP, Node.js, Redux, React...
Experience
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Git, MacOS, Linux, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Vim Text Editor
The most amazing...
...is leading the GPay US team, where we delivered zero to one of the new GPay apps in under one year during the pandemic.
Work Experience
Software Engineer
2018 - PRESENT
- Worked with large batch systems processing large log sets and transform and load logs into useable dashboards.
- Designed distributed systems that interfaced over RPC using protocol buffers for serializing data across systems.
- Created scalable systems that were highly available, consistent, and met business requirements.
- Built job queues that interface with third-party vendors to process user requests.
- Took business requirements and specified out the technical requirements along with deadlines.
- Worked with a team to implement requirements.
Technologies: Hibernate, HTTP, RPC, Jobs, Batch, Distributed Systems, SQL, Java, JavaScript, REST APIs, Python, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Software Engineer
2017 - 2018
Affirm
- Tailored their merchant portal for "VCN" merchants unlocking a 15% increase in revenue year over year (YOY).
- Specified, led, and built a merchant onboarding experience that was tailored to smaller merchants—bringing about a 25% increase in merchants year over year (YOY).
- Built from scratch the merchant onboarding flow; using the complete stack (React, Redux, React Router, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Celery, Luigi, MySQL, Dynamo, Elasticsearch, and S3).
- Added appropriate tracking that enabled analytics to build robust dashboards which revealed what the funnel merchants went through while signing up. Used these dashboards to increase the pass-through rate of merchants at each step of the flow.
- Weighed different design tradeoffs for the merchant onboarding flow and chose the design decision that optimized speed-to-market, extendability, and medium-term throughput.
Technologies: Luigi, Celery, gRPC, MessagePack, Redux, React, JavaScript, SQLAlchemy, Flask, Python, REST APIs, PostgreSQL
Software Engineer
2016 - 2017
Terrain Digital
- Developed a referral platform for Travelocity—enabling Travelocity to target their ambassadors to leverage their network. This platform also allows Travelocity to track user events, aggregate on those events, and trigger rewards for their users.
- Built Ourcarebill.org which "trended" on Twitter during the 2016 election—enabling health markets to develop a stronger brand and convert customers.
- Worked with Christiancinema.com to build a video-on-demand service that worked on most streaming platforms (web, iOS, Android, Firestick, Roku)—contributing to Christiancinema.com be acquired.
- Implemented, for Christiancinema.com, HLS as the streaming protocol and used S3 to store chunks of video that each frontend could request and stitch together.
- Installed an encrypt/decryption layer that secured content on a per-user basis; for Christian Cinema.
- Worked directly with clients in defining business requirements.
- Created proposals for phases of work.
- Estimated the number of engineering resources need and led the implementation details.
- Developed a standard project management plan for all of our projects that enabled tech leads to drive projects and meet project deadlines.
Technologies: Redis, DYNAMO, Koa, Express.js, MongoDB, MySQL, PHP, Node.js, Redux, React, REST APIs, PostgreSQL
Software Engineer
2015 - 2016
Nationstar Mortgage
- Collaborated with a new middleware team that brought siloed parts of the organization under service-oriented architecture; used Java, Spring Boot for microservices and RAML for the public interface.
- Led the front-end portion of the new brand launched for Nationstar (now Mr. Cooper); used React, Redux, and custom UI components.
- Developed a Ruby on Rails back-end that acted as the application layer between the React front-end and the middleware layer; used PostgreSQL as the auxiliary storage engine.
- Practiced extreme TDD, writing all of the tests prior to picking up a ticket.
- Ensured 100% unit tests coverage and effective integration and feature tests covering the whole codebase.
- Designed and bulit the tests to cover all of them under an hour .
- Developed a continuous integration tool that allowed instant releases across all of our environments.
Technologies: Spring Boot, Java, Ruby on Rails (RoR), PostgreSQL, Redux, React, REST APIs, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Software Engineer
2015 - 2015
TourConnect
- Worked with a small engineering team to develop and maintain TourConnect's web application.
- Built a LinkedIn-style, B2B communication tool for tourism companies to do business online.
- Developed the front-end with React, the back-end with Node.js, and the legacy code with Ruby on Rails.
- Worked closely with the Material-UI team to implement Material-UI into our views and helped to improve the codebase.
Technologies: Back-end, Front-end, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby, Node.js, React, REST APIs, PostgreSQL
Software Engineer
2013 - 2015
Novation Mobile
- Consulted for Novation Mobile to build cutting-edge web applications for clients.
- Built ClassMind, a real-time tool for teachers to interact with students (Node.js, Angular).
- Created the iPhone and Android apps for Zoccam.com (Cordova and Angular).
- Developed on an automated mortgage web app called PMC (Node.js, Angular).
Technologies: Cordova, Angular, Node.js, Android, iOS, REST APIs, PostgreSQL
Experience
Affirm Merchant Onboarding
https://www.affirm.com/businessAffirm provides point-of-sale lending on behalf of merchants to their customers. When I first joined Affirm, merchants could only integrate with Affirm by going through a lengthly sales process.
I created this onboarding form that enables merchants to enter their company's information. I also built the back-end data pipelines that handled the merchant's data.
Furthermore, it was crucial to construct a form that was tailored to the merchants' workflow so I tracked merchant interactions, built a funnel to narrow down development efforts, and increased the initial conversions from 5% to 10%.
Since the launch in April, the number of merchants with Affirm has grown over 25%, just through this one flow.
I created this onboarding form that enables merchants to enter their company's information. I also built the back-end data pipelines that handled the merchant's data.
Furthermore, it was crucial to construct a form that was tailored to the merchants' workflow so I tracked merchant interactions, built a funnel to narrow down development efforts, and increased the initial conversions from 5% to 10%.
Since the launch in April, the number of merchants with Affirm has grown over 25%, just through this one flow.
Our Care Bill
Our Care Bill had a very tight deadline. Trump's inauguration was January 20th and health markets had approached Terrain Digital, my employer at the time, on January 5th. They had an idea to allow Americans to voice what their health care should be. I worked with their team and designer and built the application from scratch in time for Trump's inauguration.
Health markets began to see "Our Care Bill" trend during the inauguration; including 4,500 people filling out the application completely which is incredible because it was quite long. Although several people filled out the application, even more came to the website to just see what Americans wanted in a bill.
In particular, I aggregated all of the results in "America's Healthcare Bill". The application ended up being a huge success for health markets due to the marketing efforts—it both helped their brand and brought in new customers.
Health markets began to see "Our Care Bill" trend during the inauguration; including 4,500 people filling out the application completely which is incredible because it was quite long. Although several people filled out the application, even more came to the website to just see what Americans wanted in a bill.
In particular, I aggregated all of the results in "America's Healthcare Bill". The application ended up being a huge success for health markets due to the marketing efforts—it both helped their brand and brought in new customers.
Affirm Merchant Portal
When I joined Affirm, only merchants with websites could log into their account and view reports on how their business was doing with Affirm.
I tailored the merchant portal for in-store merchants so those merchants could log in to their account and view transactions with Affirm.
This work allowed Affirm to offer in-store financing, including with Walmart, Peloton, and Simple Mac.
I tailored the merchant portal for in-store merchants so those merchants could log in to their account and view transactions with Affirm.
This work allowed Affirm to offer in-store financing, including with Walmart, Peloton, and Simple Mac.
Skills
Languages
Java, SQL, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Python 3, Python 2, Batch, DYNAMO, Ruby
Frameworks
Jasmine, OAuth 2, Redux, Koa, Express.js, Angular, Serverless Framework, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Hibernate, Flask, MUI (Material UI), Spring Boot, gRPC
Libraries/APIs
Q Promises, Passport.js, Underscore.js, REST APIs, HTTP API, Node.js, React, Socket.IO, Luigi, SQLAlchemy, React Router
Tools
Sequelize, Webpack 3, Webpack 2, Webpack 4, Webpack, Karma, Browserify, NPM, Mocha, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudFront CDN, Celery, RabbitMQ, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Git, IntelliJ IDEA, Vim Text Editor
Paradigms
Design Patterns, Functional Programming
Storage
Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Redis, Memcached, NoSQL, MongoDB, MySQL
Industry Expertise
Security
Other
Algorithms, WebSockets, HTTP Request Methods, Async.js, OOP Designs, Closures, Lambda Functions, System Security Developer, System Design, OAuth, Cloudflare, Distributed Systems, Jobs, RPC, HTTP, Front-end, Back-end, Cordova, MessagePack
Platforms
AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), MacOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
Education
2009 - 2013
Bachelor of Science Degree in Mathematics
University of North Texas - Denton, TX, USA