University of Chicago

Edmund Burke School

Technical Lead at Ellevation Education

Grow Therapy

Technical Lead

Skills: Flask · React.js · Next.js · Tailwind CSS · Python

Senior Software Engineer

Designed and built systems for managing account provisioning and providing better data to business intelligence, including building out a way for LD to provide all employees free innovation accounts. Revamped system for marking customer data as HIPAA compliant, automated part of sales process in a way that eliminated costly human error during deal closing, and replaced dependence on a redundant SAAS services that saved us close to $10K a year.

Introduced dependency injection and unit testing best practices to the team, increasing increasing code testability and catching bugs before they hit production.

Led the gender minorities ERG and mentored team interns. Ran team retros, helped spearhead adoption of Agile practices, and took point on designing interview process for interns.

LaunchDarkly

Led a team of 4 engineers through several sizable projects to overhaul our legacy codebase, including overdue ElasticSearch and .Net Core major version upgrades. Re-architected core parts of our aging, denormalized data models and figured out how to backfill data without disruption to customers via our data ingest process. Designed and helped the team build Ellevation's interface for communication between microservices, in a major cross-team effort. 

Served on D&I executive board, organizing and hosting company-wide events around diversity and inclusion. Brought in speakers and panelists and hosted workshops on race, class, and gender.

Ellevation Education

Helped design and build out data model and ingestion process for Ellevation's first direct to student offering, Ellevation Math. Took initiative to do analysis of shortcomings of our deployment process, leading to a solo project working closely with the CTO to design and build out a deployment latency monitoring tool, using Flask and Serverless. That project was then used as a template as we transition away from a monolithic C# architecture to microservices.

Spearheaded creation of coding standards across C# and Python stacks, and introduced acceptance testing and BDD practices. Gave tech talks on best practices like TDD, functional programming principles, and clean code. Mentored other developers and members of the data integration team.

Elected to the leadership team for the D&I group, DELL.

Perceptive Automata is an ML startup spun out of the Harvard Innovation Lab, focused on understanding human behavior in machine-dominated environments. At Perceptive, I was a senior member and interim department head of the data team. Contributed to defining technical strategy, created coding guidelines, and helped design OKR and sprint process.

Build out training and deployment infrastructure for computer vision models in AWS, and introduced Airflow to manage the data ingestion pipeline. Shipped a public-facing data annotation website for collecting data from citizen-scientists, introducing team to React, Redux, and modern front end practices as part of the project. Extended and maintained existing website for designing and running experiments, including adding error monitoring, deployment process, and automated schema management. Rearchitected data access layer and more than doubled test coverage of core repositories while regularly shipping new features.

Managed three direct reports, and participated in the hiring process for the technical team. 

Technologies used include: Python, Flask, Javascript, React, Jinja2, AWS (EC2, S3), PostgreSQL, Linux (Ubuntu), Airflow

Perceptive Automata, Inc.

Senior Fullstack Engineer & Interim Engineering Manager

Helped design and implement a rewrite of the APIs serving our mobile applications, laying the groundwork for a move to a microservices architecture. Worked on the implementation of IdentityServer, to provide secure authentication across these services. Served on the Architectural Review Board and continued as lead of the production monitoring team.

Technologies I've worked with in this role include .Net Core,  Standard, and 4.5, MVC 5, WebApi, IdentityServer, CloudFormation, AWS, and TeamCIty.

Buildium LLC

Fullstack developer on a cross-functional team working on core pieces of Buildium's rental and HOA management functionality. Worked on a variety of projects, including 3rd party integrations, greenfield application development, and even deployment processes. Was part of the team that successfully 'lift and shift'-ed our production environment from Rackspace to AWS, introducing infrastructure as code along the way. 

Formed and led the production monitoring team, which eventually came to include the entire engineering organization. I defined our incident response plan in collaboration with the CTO, and trained all new employees on the process as part of onboarding.

Software Engineer

I worked primarily as a back-end developer on the team responsible for building out new add-on features and incorporating services through Buildium's partners. As an example of the things I worked on at Buildium, I helped design and build a stand-alone application (and continuous build and deployment process for it, using Octopus and TeamCity) for managing enrollment in a major credit and background screening service and communicating with Buildium's main application. 

I work with C#, MySQL, and some Angular and Knockout. We practice Agile SCRUM methodologies, TDD, and use Git/Bitbucket for source control.

Jr. Software Engineer

At Launch I've become familiar with the Ruby on Rails stack and web development best practices. In particular, I've worked with Ruby/Rails, Sinatra, Javascript and JQuery, TDD (RSpec and Capybara), OOD, Git and Github, Postgresql and Bootstrap. Take a look at my Github for examples of projects I've worked on, or follow the links under my projects to see apps I've deployed.

Launch Academy, Inc

Ruby on Rails apprentice at Launch Academy

Performed various coding, design, marketing, and administrative tasks such as:

Energy Options Network (Data Analyst)

-Helped develop high-level explanations of the current energy technology landscape and how EON's strategy fits into that space for use in presentation materials. 

-Copy-edited and drafted presentation and business materials, including sections of EON's business plan and pitch decks for use in investor meetings, in close collaboration with the founder and CEO. 

-Researched economic, demographic, and technological trends relevant to clean energy and carbon capture in the coming century. Used Matplotlib (a 2D Python plotting library similar to Matlab) and Inkscape to create graphics that conveyed this information clearly and professionally.

Chiron Sciences (Web designer and business consultant)

- Re-branding, logo and website design, scientific and market research, created marketing decks and other materials, CRM software management.

Lucid Inc

Freelancer/Consultant

Worked on high-level case analysis directly with associate attorneys and partners at the firm. Supervised a team of three to assist attorneys with all aspects of case workup, helped direct office workflow, and designed projects for others.

Personally compiled evidence summaries related to more than a hundred asbestos exposure toxic torts lawsuits as part of a multi-district litigation. This required great facility with large and complex relational databases, familiarity with the standards of evidence required in asbestos torts cases in IL, WI, and IN, and an ability to quickly absorb information about industrial construction and maintenance. 

Searched for and interviewed witnesses for specific cases and drafted preliminary affidavits based on my notes. Helped draft discovery responses, produced relevant exhibits, and served documents to defense. Provided support to attorneys responding to motions for summary judgment.

On my own initiative, I produced a training and documentation packet that is now a standard part of employee orientation. Subsequently, I helped train the majority of new employees in my department.

Helped recruit new employees using major job boards like LinkedIn and CareerBuilder, screened resumes, and interviewed candidates.

Cascino Vaughan Law Offices, Ltd.

Legal Assistant

Researched, assessed, and compiled a database of almost 3,000 sales leads, by using Python to scrape freely available information from various nonprofits' webpages and then translate that information into a format compatible with SugarCRM and High Rise.

Alla Hoffman