Alex Ellison
Experience
Butter Payments
May 2022 – Present
Senior Software Engineer
- Unlocked revenue growth in enterprise customer segment by establishing a scalable pattern for ingesting payments data in a processor-agnostic way.
- Achieved 4x faster payment processor integrations by rearchitecting Butter's domain model.
- Decreased incident resolution time and curtailed Engineering head count growth by architecting high-level patterns for driving adoption of Temporal.
- Reduced local dev overhead via Docker, unit test mocking, and parallelization improvements.
Better.com
November 2020 – May 2022
Senior Software Engineer
- Cut mortgage origination costs 20% by iteratively optimizing a library of event-driven services underpinning the underwriting process.
- Oversaw development of rules engine that enabled underwriters to automate decision-making and shorten loan closing time.
- Implemented A/B testing framework to measure OCR accuracy on underwriting documents and its downstream impact on underwriting decisions, enabling data-driven model and vendor improvements.
Voltus
November 2017 – October 2020
Technical Architect
- Engineer #2 at startup that's now ~275 employees. Revenue grew 10x, 5x, 2x during my tenure.
- Developed stream processing microservices using Kafka Streams to deliver real-time, customizable telemetry aggregations to end users.
- Built data pipelines to forecast customer earnings using Pandas, Dask, Dagster and S3 data lake.
- Dismantled Flask monolith into microservices. Improved reliability, scalability, and dev velocity.
ThinkShout
October 2013 – November 2017
Senior Software Engineer
- Lead development teams on splcenter.org, humanesociety.org, feedingtexas.org, tolerance.org, reproductiverights.org among other mission-driven organizations.
- Produced technical budgets for each of the projects I architected and collaborated with clients throughout development to manage scope while respecting budget and time constraints.
Schrödinger
August 2010 – October 2013
QA Data Scientist
- Developed automated testing infrastructure (CLI & GUI) used by computational chemists to monitor fluctuations in experimental results.
- Oversaw continuous integration suite across 20+ Unix & Windows operating systems.
Education
Connecticut College
B.A. in Bioinformatics
Carnegie Mellon University
National Science Foundation grantee
Skills
Python (FastAPI, Pandas, Dask, Dagster, Temporal.io)
Kafka (+ Streams)
PostgreSQL
Docker
AWS ecosystem