Page last updated on January 4, 2020
ALEX's STORY
Alex is a mechanical engineer and mathematician with over fifteen years of experience developing complex network and software solutions. Alex founded 21Productions, his first successful startup, at the age of 17. By his 23rd birthday, he was licensing his software systems to some of the nation’s leading universities.
A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, Alex serves as the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Varys. Alex provides a vision of innovation-driven development that deeply integrates into the public relevance of its products. By focusing on the intricate links between growing trends of new media, end-user interaction and relevant cutting-edge technology, Alex insures that Varys is able to achieve its goals while maintaining a level of momentum, simplicity and scale not achievable by the competition.
He also serves as the Co-Founder and Chief Data Officer of Speak With Me, where he develops and maintains a low latency data layer for the company's cognitive, conversational AI platform. In his spare time, Alex is an avid fan of cinema, an audiophile and a gamer.
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
““An engineer’s job, whether a mechanical, electrical or music engineer, is to solve problems — and Alex did. In fact, he hasn’t stopped.””
BACKGROUND: HARDWARE
Systems
Server and workstation maintenance for Macintosh and Linux
Shared Area Network (SAN) and iSCSI
Network services including AFP, DHCP, DNS, FTP, NAT, NFS, VPN and WINS
VMWare ESXi and virtual machine configuration
Datacenter virtual machine and cloud OS deployment, including Amazon
Big data management for 1PB+ datasets, including scalable RDBMS support
Networks
Advanced layer 2-7 networking with ipfw firewall and ifconfig
Thorough knowledge of SonicWall hardware
Bandwidth optimization for high load data networks involving RAID and SAN
Low latency optimization and load balancing
Multimedia
Extensive knowledge in video SD and HD standards, I/O and codecs
Optimized compression of video and audio for local and remote playback
Advanced color-space, frame rate and standards conversion
Audio recording, mixing and mastering knowledge for specialized media
Video edit, composition, special effects and color grading
BACKGROUND: SOFTWARE
Languages
Core: Awk, Bash, C, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, R
JS: Bootstrap, dc.js, jQuery
OS: Applescript, Quicktime API, Unix Shell
Web: AJAX, CSS3, HTML5, Javascript, NodeJS, PHP
Operating Systems
*nix: CentOS, Debian, IRIX, RedHat, Solaris, SUSE, Ubuntu, Yocto
Mac: OS 7-9, OS X, OS X Server
Windows: XP, Vista, Windows 7+
Software
Adobe: Master Collection
Apple: Aperture, Final Cut Studio, Xsan
Avid: Media Composer, ProTools HD
Data: Hadoop, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, Sphinx
Web: Apache, Nginx