The George Washington University

Tech Lead Manager at Google

London, United Kingdom

Leading an Android team creating delightful experiences for Pixel users.

Google

Tech Lead Manager

Worked on Google Fit Android and Wear OS apps.Android TL for several areas in the 2018 Fit relaunch and following.

Software Engineer

I joined YPlan as the sole Android developer at the time. I immediately began reworking the development process for the mobile team to bring it up to par in terms of quality and speed of delivery. I set up our continuous integration system, automated building and signing releases and defined a code review process. On the main application, aside from delivering new features, I began refactoring the code to allow for testability and started writing tests, where no testing had previously been done on the app.In autumn 2015, I also built Cinema Club from scratch to initial launch. It was prototyped in one week and launched to market in 3 weeks. The app architecture is modular and layered, testing coverage is very good and crash rate has been steadily low from launch day.In addition to developer duties, I took leadership of the mobile engineering team (Android and iOS) in February 2016. I ensured best practices are followed across the team, held regular 1-1s with each team member and liaised between the engineers and upper-management. I also worked closely with the product team on planning and strategy to help ensure we were setting realistic expectations and meet our goals.Finally, in the first half of 2016, I’ve also built our YPlan Access app, for our event partners to be able to scan guest tickets for their events, check guest lists and more. This has been built in parallel with work on other apps and was publicly launched in April 2016.

YPlan

Mobile Engineering Lead

Tech lead for the full lifecycle of Yahoo Fantasy Football (project started in January 2014) and the internal video library (since December 2014).I have helped build Yahoo's Android team in London and in July 2014 we shipped Fantasy Football to the Play Store. The app, localised in over 20 locales from launch day, has topped 100k MAUs and has had a consistent 4-star rating.From the very beginning I ensured we use a continuous integration pipeline, heavy testing using Robolectric and also, to a lesser extent, Robotium UI tests. After the initial launch, we started making very heavy use of A/B testing and instrumentation for data-driven product decisions.In December I also took lead of the Android internal video library. At the time this was only a companion library for one of our apps, but it had to become usable by any app in the company. By end of March, I had published a new version of the library with a new API (heavily simplified and fluent), internal instrumentation, CD pipeline with unit tests and significant performance improvements in terms of cold start time and memory use.

Yahoo!

Technical Lead / Senior Android Developer

Created a simulation prototype for the native ads marketplace. The goal was to get an intuition of how adjusting parameters for serving our native ads could influence the overall metrics. The prototype was a success and a team was formed to develop the project full-time.Created JVM-based web-services using Spring and Jersey for web and mobile clients. I optimised our REST API for the mobile clients and wrote an in-memory cache system to improve response time.I designed and built key parts of a static webpage analyser. The goal was to analyse landing pages for mobile ads and score these based on their mobile appropriateness so that we could feed this back to advertisers.

Backend/Big Data developer

I worked in Commodities IT on the EDealing team. My team developed and actively maintained a real-time trading platform for clients that allowed them to place trades with us either algorithmically through an API or directly through our desktop application.I worked on many different parts of the stack, including the responsive client-facing application (C# / WPF), as well as the back-end server processes (Java and Slang – GS’s internal language) that were handling our large trade volumes. I also directly supported our sales and trader teams and created ad-hoc applications for them.

Goldman Sachs

Analyst/Developer

I designed and developed custom WPF controls, as part of the core technologies group in the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities division.My main project was building a search-as-you-type drop-down box capable of handling very large sets of data and also of being connected to the varied database systems that the company employed. This project was adopted by the core technology team after my internship.

Summer Analyst (Developer)

Developed and conduct weekly labs for undergraduate students.

George Washington University

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Designed and implemented an electronic voter-verifiable voting protocol with an accessible interface (Java, XML, Android). Mentored a small team of undergraduate students working on development and testing. Required good knowledge of cryptographic primitives, discrete mathematics and programming.

Research Assistant

Coached the university's teams for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Conducted weekly classes covering theoretical concepts as well as their practical application to the the competition and team strategy techniques.

Programming Coach

Fixed bugs in the back-end libraries of the AIM client, worked on new connectivity functionality for AIM and ICQ, designed and developed AIM plug-ins for use with social networks and contributed to the developer website.

Alex Florescu