Alex Leighton

Experience

Amazon Register

register.amazon.com | Seattle, WA

Working on the Amazon Register mobile application team. The Amazon Register mobile app enables customers to process credit card payments on their mobile device.

• Backend Development [Java, DynamoDB, S3, SQS]
  • One of the leaders of development on the tier-1 transaction processing system, involving coordination between the synchronous service, the high-availability data store, and the asynchronous processing system.
  • Owned development of the changes to Amazon's interface with Chase Paymentech in order to enable processing of EMV transactions.
  • Integrated the transaction processing system with many internal services, for the purposes of balance tracking, accounting, fraud detection/prevention, and etc.
• Mobile Development [Objective C, iOS, Java, Android]
  • Completely reworked interface with native card reader drivers for both iOS and Android apps.
  • Maintained the HTML5/Backbone/Handlebars single-page hybrid app.

On Time Systems Inc.

imagreendriver.com | Eugene, OR

Worked on the Green Driver and Enlighten mobile apps as a member of the Green Driver team. The Green Driver mobile app was a GPS navigation application using traffic light prediction technology to find the route to the customer's destination that avoided red lights. The Enlighten app provided the same traffic light prediction technology without the map and navigation features.

• Mobile Development [Objective C, iOS, Java, Android, JNI, C]
  • Led the development of the Green Driver Android client.
  • Led the development of the Enlighten Android client.
  • Maintained existing Green Driver iOS client.
• Monitoring & Reporting [C++, Javascript, Postgresql]
  • Sole developer of a monitoring, reporting, and notification framework used in all of the backend servers.
  • Created a web-based dashboard for real time viewing of monitored data.
  • Notification that sends emails and text messages on alert status.
• Backend Development [C++, Python, C]
  • Developed a query parser for the internal geocoder, achieving an improvement in the runtime by a factor of 10 over the existing parser.
  • Created an efficient binary protocol for exchanging atlas data between tile server and clients. Reduced message size by a factor of 4.
  • Maintained Green Driver backend servers in Python and C++.

Education

Master of Science, Computer and Information Science

University of Oregon, Eugene OR

Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science

Willamette University, Salem OR
Graduated cum laude

Skills

Languages

Experienced: Java, Python, OCaml
Competent: C++, Javascript, C, Haskell, Objective C, PHP

Technologies

Publications

Green Driver: AI in a Microcosm

Coauthor, paper presented at the AAAI Conference, August 2011 [aaai.org]