Ali Al-Musawi

Software Engineer

Amazon•  May 2023 - December 2023

- Launched Alexa Skill Quality Coach (https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-skill-quality-coach) in pt-BR and de-DE locales in my first month by augmenting the production ML model with additional inputs and locale-specific parameters to compute quality scores for Alexa 3P skills. In addition, I extended the Alexa Developer Console (https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/devconsole/about-the-developer-console.html) to display actionable, score-dependent and intelligent insights for 3P skill developers to improve the customer experience. I used S3, Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Java, SQL, TypeScript, and React to achieve this. As a result, we identified and promoted high-quality skills in those locales. - Modernized Alexa Suggests promotions by giving internal users the ability to customize promotion background images and skill icons within a tight 2-week time frame. I modified the rendering template, extended the back-end to store custom image URLs, extended the internal front-end portal to allow users to target different viewports with different custom images while preserving backwards compatibility. I used Java, TypeScript, React, DynamoDB, and Alexa Presentation Language to achieve this. As a result, customer click-through rate for various 3P skill promotions has more than quadrupled, and Audible increased its subscription rate. -Designed an LLM-powered promotion proof of concept that combines different atomic 3P Alexa skills to achieve high-level experiences such as planning a party or a game night. As a result, I won the most customer-obsessed award in an internal Hackathon. - Unfortunately, I was laid off as a result of Amazon Alexa-wide role reduction campaign (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/17/amazon-cuts-several-hundred-jobs-in-alexa-division.html).

Software Engineer

Amazon•  May 2022 - September 2022

- Launched granular distributions on the Alexa Developer Console (https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/devconsole/about-the-developer-console.html) for Alexa skill developers to view usage of their skills broken down by country and device type. I extended the console’s data pipeline by extracting, transforming and ingesting usage metrics, then I developed efficient aggregation queries on Elasticsearch (ES) to fit within timeout requirements, extended the console backend to retrieve the data from ES, and extended the frontend with dashboards to display the distributions. I used SQL, TypeScript, React, Java, S3, Lambda, and Redshift. As a result, we closed the most requested feature intakes for the developer console.

Software Engineer

IBM•  May 2021 - May 2022

- Launched a series of enhancements and bug fixes in IBM’s Change Data Capture for replication from SQL databases to Apache Kafka clusters. I added additional configurations for users to: customize Kafka topic replication sinks, customize Kafka producer serializer, inject custom record headers, and allow our clients to bring their own libraries to add encryption and additional custom layers to the Kafka replication flow. As a result, our sales engineer was able to close several deals with high-profile clients by leveraging the enhancements in his proof-of-concepts.

Western University

Data Science, BS•  September 2018 - June 2023

- Graduated with a 4.0 cumulative GPA and majored in Data Science. - I studied software engineering principles, object-oriented design, data structures and algorithms, database development, data analysis, and machine learning.