Adam Alpern
Senior iCloud Software Engineer at Apple
Principal Engineer
NOTE: I am not currently looking for new opportunities. Thanks for looking, and good luck with your candidate search. 

Principal-level engineer with over 22 years of experience at the platform, application & application suite levels. Programming since I was 8, which is more years than I actually want to think about. Experienced in the entire software lifecycle from requirements gathering through delivery & maintenance. I have deep experience in high performance API services on many different platforms over my career, including multi-threaded C++ and Java REST services, and most recently RPC services in Golang. 

Specialties: C++, multithreading, HTTP, network protocols, REST, XML, performance, infrastructure design & implementation, indexed search, development methodology, refactoring, service-oriented architecture, tools
Apple
https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple
San Francisco Bay Area
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Senior iCloud Software Engineer
Anki
https://www.linkedin.com/company/anki
Anki shut down on May 1st, 2019, due to a lack of funding. 

* Cloud platform services in Golang, REST and GRPC
  * Designed and implemented a reusable Golang framework for building GRPC and REST services in a standardized manner integrated with Anki's standard deployment, configuration, and monitoring practices
  * Implemented certificate-based authentication system for Anki's cloud-connected Vector robot
  * Implemented audit system for the account system to log all account changes
  * Instrumentation of REST and gRPC services for metrics collection & monitoring
* Interim Lead Data Infrastructure Engineer
  * Took over as interim lead Data Infrastructure engineer to fill gaps in the mobile analytics platform and produce a year long roadmap to scalability.
  * Amazon Redshift optimization 
    * Optimized fact tables in multi-terabyte AWS Redshift schema and nightly ETL queries
  * Helped build out the data infrastructure team
  * Data Warehouse event ingestion pipeline for mobile analytics with Go, Amazon SQS, S3, and Redshift
* Participated in hiring to expand the Cloud Services, Cloud AI, Cloud Infrastructure (SRE), and Data Infrastructure teams
* Code review, mentoring, software architecture and technology evaluation, definition of standard practices and tools
* Performed annual load-testing and performance analysis of APIs and analytics systems to prepare for holiday load spike of more than 100 times normal traffic
* Built the majority of our operational dashboards for monitoring the Anki Vector robot's cloud activity
* Worked with the robot OS and SDK teams to optimize cloud API calling patterns for scalability
San Francisco Bay Area
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Senior Do-Whatever's-Needed Engineer
Urban Airship
https://www.linkedin.com/company/airship-social
* Designed and implemented UA's version 3 public REST API, which unified several years of divergent, redundant APIs into a single unified API.
  * Led every aspect of the project - gathering requirements from multiple stakeholders, reaching consensus on API design across multiple teams, writing technical specifications and engineering documentation, tasking, estimating, planning milestones, and implementation. 
* Worked on low-level interfacing with push providers such as APNS, GCM, ADM, and WNS.
* Scalable RPC services and micro-services to support mobile devices.
* High throughput event processing with Kafka.
* Refactored legacy internal services from Python and MongoDB to Java and Hbase for scalability.
* Major contributor to the Marketing Automation product line, including addressing scalability challenges.
* Designed integration with Gimbal's location beacons.
* Created and released Tessera as open-source. Tessera is a front-end for accessing operational metrics data.
* Built internal tooling for process automation, automating aspects of deployment, and production monitoring.
San Francisco Bay Area
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Principal Engineer
OpenTable, Inc.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/opentable
Numerous responsibilities over 7 years. Primary responsibility for the
design and performance of many aspects of OpenTable's network of
nearly 20,000 real time restaurant systems distributed worldwide,
including the challenges of scaling them up 10X. 

* Refactored the internals of the restaurant availability caching system to improve its scalability. Went from major response time spikes at 20 msgs/sec to being able to handle over 1,200 msgs/sec on the same low-end consumer hardware. The cache server was implemented in highly concurrent C++ with lockless data structures.
* Designed a REST API to replace proprietary client access protocols. Designed and implemented the C++ server side framework for implementing entity handlers, essentially a Ruby-on-Rails like framework in C++. Also implemented:
  * Client side libraries in C++, C# and Objective-C. Took over portions of the iOS client development when off-shore code did not meet quality standards.
  * Load testing and performance measurement tools in Ruby and C# .NET. The principles of the REST dialect also been re-used to enable the rapid creation of other APIs and products.
  * API functional testing in Cucumber
* Designed and implemented a remote telemetry system that can send arbitrary data from the restaurant network's devices to the datacenter, where it could be routed and processed flexibly. Used to harvest metrics for both reliability monitoring and business forecasting. In production for 6 years with very few issues. Used HTTP to dump XML data into a message processing queue which routes it for appropriate back-end processing.
* Implemented Windows CE device drivers for integration with 3rd party Point of Sale terminals.
* Implemented automated build and unit testing frameworks for legacy and new code bases, encompassing C++, C#, MS SQL Server, and HTTP API testing.
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Principal Software Engineer
InQuira, Inc.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/inquira
* Indexing and information retrieval in Java for a Natural Language based search engine.
 * Designed and implemented an efficient binary, random access index file format for storing large word indexes.
 * Designed and implemented an expression evaluator for querying indexes with boolean logic.
 * Implemented scoring strategies for ranking search results.
 * Designed and implemented a flexible query cache, which included tunable caching strategies for optimizing expression evaluation, optimization of query trees through common sub-expression removal, and extensive performance and memory optimization.
 * Extensive JVM measurement and tuning for optimization of performance and memory usage.
* Implemented a variety of content management system adaptors, for indexing dynamic content.
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Senior Software Engineer
Firepond, Inc.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/firepond
Firepond acquired Brightware in February of 2001.
Senior Software Engineer
Brightware, Inc
Brightware was one of the first companies in the automated email response and web-based recommendations space in the mid 1990s, and a second-wave AI company. Its products integrated natural language processing with a product knowledge base to suggest auto responses to email inquiries, and to drive a product recommendation website from a natural language query interface.

Firepond acquired Brightware in February, 2001.

* Core designer of the system level architecture to migrate Brightware's product suite from its initial proprietary technology base to Java. Included common data representation for results of multiple stages of natural language analysis and other processing across email and web requests.
* Implemented a multi-threaded HTTP 1.0 server for adapting the legacy ART*Enterprise system to act as a web service. Utilized C++ iostreams adapted to TCP/IP sockets for low-level I/O. This enabled trivial recording of HTTP sessions for later playback.
* Also created an object oriented interface to this HTTP server in the ARTScript rule system embedded in ART*Enterprise.
* Implemented a full CORBA language binding for ARTscript, a dynamic LISP variant. Included full client side and server side code generation from IDL.
* Created low-level TCP/IP socket binding for ARTscript for network programming.
* Maintained an extensive library of C++ templates across Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, and A/IX. Implemented std::basic_string<T> from the draft ISO C++ spec.
Senior Software Engineer
BA
Undergraduate thesis in Software Agents and Blackboard Systems, with an application to real-time simulation of Jazz improvisation. Utilized case-based reasoning techniques within a parallel blackboard system architecture.
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
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Hampshire College
https://www.linkedin.com/school/hampshire-college/
Stuyvesant High School
We describe recent extensions to our framework for the automatic generation of music-making programs. We have previously used genetic programming techniques to produce musicmaking programs that satisfy user-provided critical criteria. In this paper we describe new work on the use of connectionist techniques to automatically induce musical structure from a corpus. We show how the resulting neural networks can b e used as critics that drive our genetic programming system. We argue that this framework can potentially support the induction and recapitulation of deep structural features of music. We present some initial results produced using neural and hybrid symbolic/neural critics and we discuss directions for future work.
Induction and Recapitulation of Deep Musical Structure
Working Notes of the IJCAI-95 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Music
http://hampshire.edu/lspector/pubs/IJCAI95mus-toappear.pdf
Researchers wishing to create computational systems that themselves generate artworks face two interacting challenges. The first is that the standards by which artistic output is judged are notoriously difficult to quantify. The larger AI community is currently involved in a rich internal dialogue on methodological issues, standards, and rigor, and hence murkiness with regard to the assessment of output must be faced squarely. The second challenge is that any artwork exists within an extraordinarily rich cultural and historical context, and it is rare that an artist who is ignorant of this context will produce acceptable works. In this paper we assert that these considerations argue for case-based AI/Art systems that take critical criteria as parameters. We describe an example system that produces new bebop jazz melodies from a case-base of melodies, using genetic programming techniques and a fitness function based on user-provided critical criteria. We discuss the role that such techniques may play in future work on AI and the arts.
Criticism, Culture, and the Automatic Generation of Artworks
Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-94, AAAI Press/The MIT Press
http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1994/AAAI94-001.pdf
Designed and implemented Tessera, a system for presenting time series metrics data from Graphite in a variety of ways not implemented by existing monitoring tools. Used internally at Urban Airship for performance monitoring and internal systems visibility.  Uses Python, SQL, HTML5/CSS, and Javascript.
Tessera
http://urbanairship.github.io/tessera/
Realtime charting of live go-metrics metrics data.
go-metrics-charts
https://github.com/aalpern/go-metrics-charts
Animal Welfare
Family Dog Rescue
https://www.linkedin.com/company/family-dog-rescue
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Volunteer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminhossain
New York City Metropolitan Area
Benjamin Hossain
Technical Product Owner at SHI International Corp.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammedjisrawi
San Francisco, CA
Mohammed Jisrawi
Software Engineer at Apple
https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanglick
New York, NY
Evan Glick
Marketing Analytics at Squarespace
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampatdisha
Orange County, CA
Disha Sampat
Data Analyst Internship at First Dynamic Business Solutions Inc. and Diamax Jewelry Data Analyst
https://www.linkedin.com/in/allan-manamel-b0916913
Greater Sacramento
Allan Manamel
Software Engineer Apps 4 at Apple
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarina-chen
San Francisco Bay Area
Sarina Chen
Software Engineer @ Apple
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-taylor-996051a7
Greater Seattle Area
Jordan Taylor
Systems Engineer at Launch Consulting Group
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustinhartje
Greater Seattle Area
Dustin Hartje
Lead Splunk Engineer @ SalesForce
https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhu-kola-01022977
Chicago, IL
Madhu Kola
DevOps/SRE Engineer at ORANJ
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonroark
Greater Chicago Area
Jon Roark
Site Reliability Engineer, Cloud Engineer, Fixer of Broken Things
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shekha-rangpara
Charlotte Metro
Shekha Rangpara
Technology Associate at Wells Fargo
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vramakr2
Raleigh, NC
Vivekanand Ramakrishnan
Watson Platform Developer at IBM Watson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditya-m-p-a86b4b52
Cupertino, CA
Aditya M P
Software Development Engineer - SRE  at Apple
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aparnashelar
Boston, MA
Aparna Shelar
Devops intern at Peapod Digital Labs, Cloud Engineer, CKA Certified
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshsuresh
Austin, TX
Akshaya Suresh
DevOps/SRE at Visa
https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepika-kadapa-26b9a8162
Vienna, VA
Deepika Kadapa
Devops Engineer at USAA
https://www.linkedin.com/in/satya-soumya-pallavajhala
Houston, TX
Soumya Pallavajhala
.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roopa-mishra-2882a81a0
Malvern, PA
Roopa Mishra
US IT RECRUITER at SoftSages Technology
Gareth Watts
      
          



            
              
        
              
  

    
        It's difficult to overstate Adam's impact on the Cloud Services team at Anki.  He combines an almost overwhelming breadth and depth of experience with an innate drive to build extremely high quality services in as pragmatic a fashion as possible, while meeting impossibly tight deadlines.

At Anki we had a moderately complex suite of Go REST micro-services when Adam joined, and through his tenure he was instrumental in moving us forward to a new gRPC based suite for Anki's Vector robot, solving problems that were at least an order of magnitude more complex, and requiring an extremely high degree of observability and reliability.  To do this, he took everything we had learned from our v1 framework and created an entirely new gRPC-based framework that incorporated a whole new set of requirements such as mutual TLS, new authentication protocols, etc.  This was all achieved in record time and had to be in use immediately by the other team members so they could build their services on top of it.  The team shipped the service suite on time, with no down time thanks to that framework and the core authentication service he then built with it.

Beyond designing and writing services, he would turn his hand to any problem that needed solving, whether big or small - Data infrastructure issues, monitoring, dashboards, deploy challenges; he was 100% committed to achieving the best possible result while working constructively with every stakeholder along the way.

Adam will infect you with his passion for software engineering.  Any team lucky enough to have him join will no doubt see immediate benefits.
 Tom Eliaz (he/him/his)
      
          



            
              
        
              
  

    
        Adam is indispensable in any organization he's a part of. His passion for technology and constant improvement helps him solve the hardest engineering challenges across tech and team. His drive to identify organizational problems and develop solutions is an engine that keeps an engineering team growing and improving.

At Anki, Adam was our most senior cloud services software engineer. He created some of our most complex and fundamental services for Vector including security and authentication APIs, data ingestion and data processing services, and others.

Adam is a spectacular software engineer who can handle the toughest challenges.

What stands out most to me about Adam's contribution to Anki is his tireless pursuit for improving the tech & team around him. 

On technology, that meant that Adam proactively created  and maintained a game-changing comprehensive GRPC service template that allowed new teams to create secure and robust APIs using all our existing tools and patterns. It meant that Adam was finding way to improve our use of go, our use of AWS, docker, etc. If Adam saw something that could be made better, he did it passionately.

On team, that meant that Adam was always considering how to improve how we worked, from how we planned end to end, to how we found opportunities for engineers to grow, and how we communicate. He brought solutions to the team, and was a driving force for change.

Adam is passionate and resourceful and will have a big impact anywhere he goes.
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Today, I submitted my resignation to Facebook.I cannot stand by Facebook’s continued refusal to act on the president’s bigoted messages aimed at…
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I left work at 2pm today. I had to pick up both my kids from school and then go to a doctor's appointment for myself. I was at a work summit…
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Boston, MA
Adam Alpern
Vice President of Risk Management at AEW Capital Management
Anki Alumni
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