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Alexander Taffe

taffealexander@gmail.com Sacramento, California, USA +1 (602) 575 - 6099

// Summary

A passionate developer with experience in building AI backends, backend web services and computer vision systems. Always eager to learn new technologies and tackle challenging problems. Currently looking for AI Engineer, Backend Software Engineer, and Computer Vision Engineer roles.

// Education

Education

University of California, Davis Logo

Master of Science in Computer Science

University of California, Davis — Davis, California

2025

Revelant coursework: Computer Vision, Machine Learning & Discovery, Vision Language Models, AI and the Human Alignment Problem.

Arizona State University Logo

Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Systems Engineering

Arizona State University — Tempe, Arizona

2017

Relevant coursework: Data Structures and Algorithms, Distributed Software Development, Software Engineering.

// Experience

Experience

Graduate Research Assistant (Marcu Lab)

The University of California, Davis — Davis, California

Feb 2024 – Aug 2025

The University of California, Davis Logo
  • Evaluated supervised point tracking models (Co-Tracker, TAPIR) for motion correction contributing to the related work section of the paper for this project.
  • Created a quantitative and a qualitative dataset of surgical videos for benchmarking motion correction performance.
  • Converted YOLO based aiming beam detection, and Superpoint based motion correction algorithm from Python to C++ for real-time performance benchmarking.
  • Wrote a Medium article detailing the process of porting Python to C++ using ONNX Runtime.
Python C++ OpenCV ONNX Runtime PyTorch

Software Development Engineer Intern

Amazon Web Services — Cupertino, California

Jun 2024 – Sep 2024

Amazon Web Services Logo
  • Enabled hardware engineers to perform granular power data analysis for regulatory compliance, performance monitoring, and debugging across AWS servers by building a serverless time-series data collection REST API for server power data using Python, AWS Lambda SQS, and DynamoDB.
Python AWS Lambda DynamoDB API Gateway SQS

Teaching Assistant - Introduction to programming with Python

The University of California, Davis — Davis, California

Sep 2023 – Jun 2024

The University of California, Davis Logo
  • Taught discussion once a week to a class of 30 students.
  • Hosted in-person and remote office hours 3 times a week.
  • Led bi-weekly 2 hour “stay late and code” homework session with tutors and students.
  • Collaborated with 2 other TAs to grade assignments and exams for 200+ students.
Python Jupyter Notebooks

Software Engineer II

Axon Enterprise — San Francisco (Remote), California

Jun 2022 – Sep 2023

Axon Enterprise Logo
  • Streamlined the workflow for 11,000 users in police departments and courts across the U.S. by enabling Axon Records users to save and search for warrants and bookings using Go, gRPC and TypeScript.
  • Improved the scalability of the records team’s search pipeline by designing and implementing a reference-based messaging approach for Kafka, enabling the search pipeline to index large payloads.
  • Ensured records search operated 24/7 by participating in on-call rotations and debugging alerts using observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk.
Golang TypeScript Kafka gRPC MySQL Docker Kubernetes Grafana Prometheus ArgoCD

Software Engineer II

PayPal — San Jose, California

Nov 2020 – Jun 2022

PayPal Logo
  • Enabled contactless payments at gas pumps for PayPal’s 400 million customers via the PayPal app by building microservices hosting GraphQL APIs, such as store search using Java and Spring Boot.
  • Improved the UX for PayPal users by improving the resiliency of the QR code teams API gateway using session polling, which enabled the gateway to handle latency in downstream API calls gracefully.
Java Spring Boot GraphQL PostgreSQL

Software Engineer II

American Express — Phoenix, Arizona

Dec 2018 – Nov 2020

American Express Logo
  • Improved UX for ~140 million card members by integrating the Groupon offers with the Amex registered card system via a RESTful API designed to ingest service establishment locations using Java and Spring.
  • Reduced remediation memo posting time by 93% by building a microservice using Golang and Postgres.
Golang Java Spring Boot PostgreSQL

Software Engineer I

Astronautics Corporation of America — Phoenix, Arizona

Jun 2016 – Dec 2018

Astronautics Corporation of America Logo
  • Modernized C++ unit tests for the company’s electronic flight instrument driver libraries, enhancing the
C++ Python