Aaron Smith

About Aaron Smith

I am a Software Engineer at Amazon, working in core networking for AWS. Before Amazon, I completed a Ph.D. in video data compression with the UNC CS department and worked there for a year as a Teaching Assistant Professor.Teaching Experience: As a UNC professor, I contributed to courses ranging from COMP 301 Foundations of Programming, which taught object-oriented principles and design patterns in Java, to COMP 426 Web Programming, which exposed students to Node.js, React, and other modern front end web development tools. I also taught COMP 110 Intro to Programming and COMP 455 Models of Languages and Computation.Academic Research: My academic research explored new techniques for scaling live video distribution to a large number of consumers and producers. This work produced multiple academic publications, a patent, and ultimately turned into my Ph.D. thesis.System Design: During my time as a graduate student at UNC, I also created My Digital Hand (MDH), a cloud hosted web tool for improving office hours in intro CS courses. When I handed off the project, MDH was actively used by about students per year.

Experience

1. Software Development Engineer

   Amazon

   Jul 2022 — Present

Education

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  Master of Science - MS, Computer Science

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science

• Coastal Carolina University

  Bachelor's Degree, BS in Mathematics and BS in Computer Science

  2010 — 2014