About Me
I am a highly experienced software engineer specializing in functional and data-oriented programming (professional Clojure developer since 2010) and AI / machine learning. My strengths include designing, implementing, and maintaining robust and scalable systems, and solving complex technical challenges that demand leadership, collaboration, and communication skills. I have achieved success in building and delivering high-impact feature sets and products such as LLM-based summarization and ranking for malware threats at Cisco, a custom payouts system at Starcity, and TalkIQ's real-time intelligence augmentation interface for sales reps and customer service agents.
My fascination with software development started early, with my childhood love of computer programming. I began programming in BASIC on a Commodore 64, later moving on to QuickBasic and Pascal. When choosing a college, I was drawn to SUNY Oswego's multi-disciplinary cognitive science program. I became their first cognitive science graduate, and my thesis was an AI model of creativity using recurrent neural nets. Initially I worked primarily in Perl, Python, and PHP, striving for simple, readable, and expressive code. Inspired by Common Lisp and the works of Paul Graham, I embraced functional programming in Perl. I'm drawn to functional and data-oriented programming because it empowers programmers to be more expressive and productive. This focus on expressiveness, alongside my interest in ergonomic design and AI augmenting the intelligence of users, has been a recurring theme in my career.
The 2010s saw Clojure becoming central to my work. I love its pragmatism, simplicity, expressive power owing to its immutable data structures and functional idiom, and robust production-quality performance. I grew my expertise in distributed systems software architecture, through a series of substantive experiences building service-oriented architectures with REST, GraphQL, and Kafka, and I continue to learn and deepen my skill set in this area of interest. I likewise honed my front-end skills, as an early adopter of ClojureScript and using React, Reagent, Re-frame, Om, and Node.js. My passion for machine learning and AI continues, both professionally and personally. More details on my professional achievements can be found in the work experience sections of my resume.
I am open to new opportunities and I am excited about contributing to a team that is pushing the boundaries of applying generative AI technology in my next role. Please feel free to connect on Linkedin or send an email to rplevy@gmail.com.