Alex Leibowitz

About Alex Leibowitz

I am a backend software engineer with 6 years of experience developing APIs, data pipelines, and event-driven systems for a billion-dollar e-commerce company. My work has included building scalable systems using GCP technologies (Dataflow, Pub/Sub, AlloyDB) and Elasticsearch to handle search and product data for tens of millions of products.While my focus is on backend systems, I also understand how these technologies integrate with frontend architectures. I have contributed to analytics and API integrations during a major architectural transition from a monolithic backend with legacy HTML templating to reactive frontend frameworks, server-side rendering (SSR), and microservices.As a developer, my motivation lies in articulating and solving the challenges inherent in building complex and efficient distributed systems. My technical expertise is grounded in the knowledge I gained through Georgia Tech’s Online Master’s in Computer Science program, while my approach is shaped by my earlier studies in mathematics, logic, and philosophy.The promise of technology is its ability to leverage the breadth of human experience to address any problem—no matter how trivial—efficiently and effectively. The joy of development comes from tackling hard questions and finding creative solutions with smart and dedicated colleagues.

Experience

1. Software Developer

   Zoro.com

   Jul 2018 — Present · Chicago, IL, US

   Zoro is a B2B e-commerce / drop-shipping company. I work as a full-stack developer and have contributed to general QA, unit and integration testing, Django, UI development in VueJS, analytics, Flask micro-services, and Elasticsearch (as a general database and search engine). Major accomplishments include (1) deploying a micro-service for integration with third party search and graceful failover with 100% test coverage;(2) designing an ETL prototype using Apache Beam; hardening the prototype and deploying to production - this represented a 2-4x performance improvement over our previous Python solution;(3) developing an API for product filtering using TDD. During this time I have also completed a master\'s degree in Computer Science through Georgia Tech\'s OMSCS.

Education

• UC Santa Barbara

  Master's degree, Classics

  2007 — 2009

• Reed College

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

  2002 — 2005

• School for International Training

  TESOL Certification, Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language/ESL Language Instructor

  2012 — 2012

• UC Santa Barbara

  Master's degree, Philosophy

  2009 — 2012

• TeacherReady

  Teaching Certification, Teaching

  2015 — 2016

• freeCodeCamp

  Front End Web Development Certificate, Computer Software Engineering

  2018 — 2018

• Georgia Institute of Technology

  Master's degree, Computer Science

Skills

• Django
• Tesol
• Entity Framework
• Flask
• English Teaching
• React.js
• Teaching English as a Foreign Language
• Latin
• Editing
• German
• Css
• Express
• Microsoft Office
• Flute
• Object-Oriented Programming (Oop)
• Grammar
• Mongodb
• Asp.net Mvc
• Research
• Public Speaking
• Microsoft Word
• Socket
• Javascript
• Teaching Writing
• Academic Writing
• Typescript
• Lesson Planning
• Mongoose
• Teaching
• Writing
• Html
• Pure Mathematics
• English as a Second Language (Esl)
• Angular
• Social Media
• Es5
• Dapper Orm
• Critical Thinking
• Microsoft Excel
• Leadership