About

My name is Alexander but please call me Alex. I was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs but have lived in many places since then including southern California, Tokyo and central Florida.

Early Years

In Chicago when I was growing up, I had a pretty normal suburban middle class American life. I loved playing video games, contact sports and all the other things young boys tend to like. I did have an infatuation with war history and tactics, which likely led to the path I took after high school. I also loved computers; tinkering with them and writing software for them. I learned to build a PC from scratch in middle school and was lucky to have access to a great computer science education in high school. This led to the fulfilling career I have today.

Military Service

In my youth I had always loved to learn about war history and how they were fought and won. This lead me to military service shortly after high school. I joined the U.S. Marine Corps first as a rifleman but later moved to be a military police officer and work in the collision investigation department. I consider my time in the military as the most formative and important to how I am today. The skills and life lessons learned I will carry with me my entire life and I know I am better off because of it.

Education

I attended university both during my military service, after and in parallel while after entering the civilian workforce. To be honest, I am probably a bit over educated, but this is only because of a core personal philosophy of mine which is that never ending learning is the only way. Between 2013 and 2019 I achieved 3 undergraduate degrees in political science, economics and computer science. Shortly after that I completed master's degrees in computer science and business (MBA).

Career

From a young age, writing software has always been of great interest to me. Computer programming seemed natural for me in a way that nothing else had at the time when I discovered it in school. This has led me to a fulfilling career in technology, helping build software in the e-commerce and mapping spaces. First starting as a software engineer at a large e-commerce company, I worked mostly with web technologies to enable very high traffic and throughput. I later transitioned to the mapping and autonomous driving space where I worked to develop HD maps and internal tooling to aid in development of said maps. Currently I am in a technical leadership role, leading software teams and providing direction and strategy.