Avi Finkel
avi@finkel.org
  12345 Lake City Way NE
#257
Seattle, WA 98125
http://www.finkel.org/avi/

Work Experience
October 2010 -
 Present
Senior Software Engineer
Brightcove, Inc, Seattle WA
  • Maintained and improved a system for migrating large amounts of video assets between CDNs.
  • Designed, implemented and deployed a content distribution system:
    • Used to upload video content to external sources, such as YouTube
    • Handled millions of change notifications per day, updating remote resources as appropriate.
    • Designed modularly in order to easily add new external distribution targets.
  • Member of operations team overseeing a globally-accessed website and web service, maintaining high availability.

August 2008 -
 August 2010
Senior Software Engineer
Microsoft, Redmond WA
  • Developed and assisted in design of Search feature for the new version of the Office Online website.
  • Maintained search indices for test data and developed test data generation code.
  • Developed a high-traffic Clipart Search web service for use by Office applications.
  • Designed and implemented a commercial-scale content upload and verification system for use by XBox game developers.

August 2005 -
 July 2008
Software Development Engineer
Amazon.com, Seattle WA
  • Refactored a high traffic system to be backed by a secondary denormalized store in addition to a higher latency transactional database.
  • Developed unit tests to assist in refactoring of this system.
  • Developed a multi-threaded application to migrate data from a single monolithic database to multiple partitioned data stores.
  • Gathered requirements for, designed and implemented a highly availabled and high traffic centralized RBAC system.
  • Developed a system for regular performance reports of many prominent website features.
  • Designed and implemented a dynamic landing-page optimization system for the Amazon catalog.
  • Improved development tools to allow for pre-release syntax checking of perl source, and fixed many of the bugs uncovered by this system.

January 2004 -
 July 2005
Senior Software Engineer
Vocollect, Inc., Pittsburgh PA
  • Developed management software to manage large installations of headless voice-managed wearable computers, using WebSphere, Informix and J2EE methedologies.
  • Developed software to provide Vocollect's speech recognition and workflow software on third-party handheld devices using C++.

September 2002 -
 December 2003
Software Engineer
CombineNet, Pittsburgh PA
  • Used apache, mod_perl and MySQL to develop large-scale reverse auction and optimization systems.
  • Developed a generic optimization scenario management interface and bid taking interface.
  • Developed a database abstraction system supporting database clustering, fault-tolerance and object-reational mapping.
  • Re-architected and re-implemented the security, user management and navigation system framework for project development.

May 2002 -
 August 2002
Contract Programmer
eFlatbed.com, Pittsburgh PA
  • Developed truckload-tracking application using Java servlets and JSP under BEA Weblogic server.

August 2000 -
 May 2002
Software Engineer
WhizBang! Labs, Pittsburgh PA
  • Developed machine learning tools, such as information extraction engines and site classifiers.
  • Designed and implemented a system of generic database access classes (ORM) in Java.
  • Implemented a system for interoperability between Java, database, and XML representations of data.
  • Implemented a Java Servlet and JSP front-end for pilot phase of WBL's ChangeDetector service.
  • Designed an Oracle database schema for backing arbitrarily large beowulf clusters.
  • Designed a distributed Java framework to drive the aforementioned clusters.
  • Developed install procedures for deploying WBL software at client sites.

March 2000 -
 July 2000
Contract Developer
eFlatbed.com, Pittsburgh PA
  • Used Java Servlets to develop a large scale eCommerce website.
  • Designed a complex data model, implemented in Oracle.
  • Designed and built the complete administrative interface.

June 1999 -
 February 2000
Programmer Analyst
Mellon Bank, Pittsburgh PA
  • Developed online banking system in a Java servlet environment:
    • Used JDBC to communicate with complex Oracle database.
    • Used MQ to communicate with legacy mainfrace applications.
    • Streamlined the entire application's exception handling system.
    • Assisted in development of a robust document delivery system.
  • Developed modular log parsing and hit reporting software:
    • Delivered large-scale monthly reports.
    • Delivered real-time reporting of on-demand statistics.
    • Simplified log reporting mechanism for use by non-technical users.
  • Designed a generic, XML-based online form system using perl.

February 1998 -
 May 1999
Production Support Analyst
Lycos Inc., Pittsburgh PA
  • Modified and maintained load-testing application written in C.
  • Extended load-testing system with network-based statistics gathering.
  • Built report and graphing frontend to load-testing statistics backend.
  • Member of small operations team, in charge of application health, systems administration and quality assurance.


September 1994 -
 January 1998
Managerial Team Leader/Classroom Manager/Consultant
UMass/Amherst Personal Computer Classroom Operations, Amherst, MA
  • Wrote programs to assist in consultant productivity and record keeping.
  • Maintained computer classroom facilities consisting of more than 100 computers.
  • Managed a consultant staff of over 150, and led a team of 4 other managers.

Summer 1997 Student Researcher
SRI International
  • Conducted independent research of adsorptive properties of mesoporous crystals using computer modelling.
  • Regular presentation of results to senior researchers.


Education
Dec. 1997 Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy
University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA
Curriculum:
  • Physics: Concentration in computational physics & simulation
  • Computer Science: Introductory & intermediate programming; Scientific simulation
  • Astronomy: Instrumentation and observational techniques; Advanced astrophysics
  • Mathematics: Calculus; Linear algebra; Differential equations; Numerical analysis

Skills
 
  • Programming: Perl, Java (Incl. J2EE), C#, C, SQL, JS/AJAX (and jQuery)

Open Source Contributions
 

References available upon request