Avi Finkel
avi@finkel.org
	12345 Lake City Way NE #257 Seattle, WA 98125 http://www.finkel.org/avi/
Work Experience
August 2008 -  Present	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.
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.
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 Development: 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. Operations: Managed web spidering system, search catalog builds, and four separate backend products including ftp/mp3 search engine. Scheduled system resource availabilty. Systems Administration: Administrator for over 80 production systems, including Digital Unix 4.0 and Solaris 2.6. Rollout and quality assurance of search engine backend products and others. Quality Assurance: Verified data integrity of new search engine backend product. Determined maximum load of search engine backend load before rollout.
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, JavaScript, Visual Basic, others Operating systems:Linux 2.x, Digital Unix 4, Solaris (2.51/2.6/7), FreeBSD, Windows (95/98/NT), DOS, MacOS, VMS, HP-UX Software: JBoss, Informix, Jakarta Tomcat, Oracle Database, Mathematica, GnuPlot, POV-Ray, MySQL, BEA Weblogic, Photoshop, IBM WebSphere, IBM VisualAge, Oracle Application Server, most major commercial office packages
Publications
	V. Boyapati, K. Chevrier, A. Finkel, N. Glance, T. Pierce, C. Whitmer ChangeDetector(tm): A Site-Level Monitoring Tool for the WWW Proceedings of The Eleventh International WWW Conference (WWW11), Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2002 http://www2002.org/CDROM/refereed/458/index.html
Open Source Contributions
	Perl modules: Image::Compare String::REPartition Time::Duration Tree::Trie

References available upon request