Alex Zall
Senior Software Engineer
"Turning lines of code into lines of success."
Proven Expertise in Established Enterprises:
Possessing a rich history of contributing to renowned organizations such as SoundCloud, Zalando, and Volkswagen, I've gained invaluable experience in navigating complex corporate landscapes, delivering high-impact software solutions, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive innovation.
Two Decades of Engineering Excellence
With over two decades of hands-on engineering experience, I've honed my skills to perfection, consistently delivering robust and scalable software solutions. My deep technical knowledge, coupled with a relentless pursuit of best practices, positions me as a seasoned professional in the software engineering domain.
Mentorship and Leadership
Beyond my technical expertise, I take pride in nurturing the next generation of software engineers. Throughout my career, I've served as a mentor and leader, guiding teams toward achieving their full potential. My commitment to fostering talent and cultivating a collaborative, high-performance culture has not only resulted in successful projects but has also empowered individuals to excel in their careers.
Buzzwordz
- Methodologies: SCRUM, TDD, Clean Code, SOLID
- Languages: Typescript, NodeJS, Python, Scala, Java
- Cloud providers: Google Cloud Services, Amazon Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure
- ML / AI: Tensorflow, LLM, ChatGPT, LLAMA2, HuggingFace, Replicate, Whisper, VertexAI
- DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Lambdas, GCS cloud functions, Terraform
- Databases: Postgresql, Cassandra, Firestore, Redis, etc.
- Messaging systems: Kafka, rabbitMQ, PubSub, Kinesis, etc.
- Frameworks: React, NextJS, NestJS, AkkA, ZIO, LangChain, Zustand
- CI / CD: CircleCI, Google Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps
Past Experience
Below is a summary of the companies and projects I worked for.
Beeboard
Dec 2023 – Present
Beeboard is saas project and process management solution
Beeboard is project management software product specializing on Lean Development methodology (aka PEP). I inherited a functioning team but with no clear technical vision. I've
- Adjusted team agile processes
- Developed a technical vision and roadmap
- Established coding standards and guidelines
- Set up a CI/CD pipeline and deployment processes
- Promoted learning culture within the team
- Introduced monitoring and alerting systems
- Improved database performace
Stack: Azure Cloud, Typescript, Terraform and Hashicorp Stack, Vue3
Quickcommerce LTD / Orcrist GmbH
Sep 2021 – Sep 2023
Quickcommerce is a company behind Zapp. Part of the team including me later separated to Orcrist GmbH but continues to work with Zapp as well as other projects.
Zapp is a grocery delivery service at that time operating in UK, Netherlands and France. I was managing a team of varying size up to 6 people. We had our fingerprints in every codebase in the company. Starting from the consumer app ending with ops infrastructure terraform code. My team and I
- Developed an internal tool for warehouse and city managers called Zappboard. It aggregated data from every other system and presented it in an actionable way
- Contributed to the last mile delivery app Zephyr. It showed the state of the order and rider's fleet on the map. And it was also deeply integrated with the Zappboard
- Built tools for scanning and picking orders in the warehouse
- Trained an ML model to predict the delivery time based on over 40 parameters and integrate it into the ordering process
- Integrating with other storefronts like Uber Eats and Deliveroo
- Contributed to the development of company- wide monitoring tools and ops infrastructure
- I was the responsible person for organizing knowledge sharing in the company.I’ve organized and facilitated tech- talks and demos
- Planned on - call rotations
Stack: Firebase and Google Cloud Services, React, TypeScript, Tensorflow, Python, Terraform
MOIA (Volkswagen)
Mar 2019 – Aug 2020
MOIA is a company under the Volkswagen umbrella.The main challenge there was to optimize supply for the demand to match a particular van to a particular order and also re - distribute vans across the city to decrease waiting time. I have
- Built a real - time simulation service that simulated the vans behavior based on real - life demand data
- Contributed to a step by step simulation service.This service could simulate a week of real - life fleet behavior which allowed to assess different ride - sharing algorithms
- Contributed to a “dispatching” service that aggregated the state of the fleet in real - time showing the vans, their routes, and customers on the map.This service was the backbone that connected vans, customers, ride - optimization services, and fleet managers.
Stack: AWS, Scala, ZIO, AKKA, Reddis, Amazon IOT
MOIA (Volkswagen)
Mar 2019 – Aug 2020
MOIA is a company under the Volkswagen umbrella.The main challenge there was to optimize supply for the demand to match a particular van to a particular order and also re - distribute vans across the city to decrease waiting time. I have
- Built a real - time simulation service that simulated the vans behavior based on real - life demand data
- Contributed to a step by step simulation service.This service could simulate a week of real - life fleet behavior which allowed to assess different ride - sharing algorithms
- Contributed to a “dispatching” service that aggregated the state of the fleet in real - time showing the vans, their routes, and customers on the map.This service was the backbone that connected vans, customers, ride - optimization services, and fleet managers.
Stack: AWS, Scala, ZIO, AKKA, Reddis, Amazon IOT
Zalando
Nov 2017 – Aug 2018
Zalando is Fashion e - commerce service. In my short time in Zalando, I’ve contributed to a few internal projects.
- Product image labeling with AI.Service described the item by “looking” at its pictures
- Product image verification.Service checked that the item has all of the required images and that the images are in the right format.White background, shoes facing right and taking 75 % of space, etc.
Stack: AWS, Scala, ZIO, Kafka
Soundcloud
Feb 2013 – Jul 2017
In my almost 5 years in soundcloud I probably got the biggest skill boost in my career as I was working shoulder to shoulder with the most talented people from around the world.I’ve also learned how a healthy and pleasant work environment can look like. Some highlights from those years are
- I am the man behind the canonical soundcloud audio player on the web
- I’ve also contributed to mobile audio players
- In the copyright protection team, I developed a pipeline that identified and automatically took down any upload that infringed someone's copyright
- I've learned scala Functional Programming techniques
Stack: Scala, Java, JavaScript, Cassandra, Kafka, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, FFMPEG, GStreamer
Other Projects
Besides a permanent day job I've been involved in a few other projects. For some of them as a consultant and for some as a founder.
https://2meters.app https://app.2meters.app
2meters is a SaS solution to manage customer queues and appointments on-site. In meters, I am a founding CTO. Together with a team of friends, we've built a service that is now used on 5 continents. We have raised a seed investment round that allowed us to hire a team of engineers to build the product. Even being involved in the project part-time I
- Built an independent team of developers who can act without micromanagement.
- Organized the work process in a manageable and predictable manner applying agile practices
- Mentored software developers
- Facilitated company-wide meetings for knowledge transfer and planning
- Communicated with leads and clients identifying their requirements
- Defined requirements for the subcontractors
As a result, the service is used by thousands of users daily and generates stable revenue.
Stack: Firebase and Google Cloud Services, React, TypeScript, NextJS
Snubes provides services to assess and track the performance of call centers' individual agents and projects overall using AI. I've inherited the team with no coding standards or principles. We had to let go most of the people keeping only the motivated ones. After setting up the essential agile processes and best practices (CI/CD, code review, git-flow, monitoring) we could deliver noticeable results Together with my team, we've
- Set up a phone call transcription pipeline using a modified version of OpenAI’s Whisper model (WhisperX)
- Developed another pipeline to analyze transcription produced by Whisper to categorize, flag, and act on them
- Built tools for scanning and picking orders in the warehouse
- Deployed a hub that received call data from various call center vendors using various techniques. (SFTP, webhooks, pull APIs)
- Built an internal leaderboard for the sales team to track the performance of individual sales managers
- Set up monitoring solutions and CI/CD pipelines for the whole company
Stack: Google Cloud Services, React, Typescript, Python, ChatGPT, Whisper, VertexAI
https://super-real.co https://super-real.co/zall
Super-real is a web-based chat where anyone can chat with celebrities or influencers backed by an AI. With a team of only 3 devs part-time, we have achieved an incredible outcome in just two months leading the project to production worldwide and generating revenue. My responsibilities were everything LLM-related
- Prompt engineering for variouse LLMs to better mock a persona
- Provide LLM with the relevant facts about the person. (Embeddings)
- Experimenting with different LLMs to achieve a better performance
- Fine tuning the model to mimic the spoken style better
- Identify when to provide additional paid content (images, voice messages)
Stack: Lang-Chain, ChatGPT, LLAMA2, TypeScript, Google Cloud Services, NextJS
Articles
Types in 3-layer application
Article gives some practical advice on how to implement a 3 layer application design pattern
Portfolio
I brought togetehr some highlight from the most recent project I participated in. Of course I can not take full credit. It goes to my team.
2Meters
2Meters is a solution to manage customer flow on site. https://manage.2meters.app
Super-real
Super-real is an AI chat-bot. The bot impersonates a real person (or sometimes a virtual one). Its customers are different celebrities, influencers, and well.... only-fans stars. Bot talks to their audience.
Snubes
Snubes specializes in quality assurance for call centers. It utilizes the recent advancements in natural language processing (aka chatGPT) to analyze the contents of phone calls. I've built the whole pipeline to transcribe, diarize (identify speakers), categorize, flag, and answer questions about the call's content. This enables tracking the performance of call campaigns as well as individual agents.
Beeboard
Beeboard Process management software. It is used to manage large projects that spans across multiple years.
Zappboard
Zappboard is a primary tool for every warehouse manager in Zapp. It aggregates the current state of the order and delivery flow and some most relevant business metrics. My team developed this app end to end.
Zephyr
Zephyr is an internal software in Zapp used to track the status of order delivery. This was a cross-team effort. My team was responsible for backend and integration with other services like Zappboard and Zone.
Zone
Zone is an app to manage warehouses, ads, and user-facing announcements. Even thou we did not own this service our team has significantly contributed to this codebase. We have built a system that automatically closes warehouses when demand reaches the warehouse's capacity. The same system was used to manually intervene in warehouse availability due to weather conditions for example or other emergencies (like robbery, yes that did happen).
Education
2003 – 2008
Novosibirsk State Technical University