Alexey Toptygin
El Cerrito, CA 94530
alexey(dot)toptygin(at)gmail.com

 

Professional Summary:

• BS in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
• 20 years software design and development experience in a variety of languages.
• 3 years software engineering team lead experience.
• 4 years system administration experience on Linux, MacOS and Windows.
• 4 years network administration experience in IPv4 LANs.
• 2 years network engineering experience in GSM and GPRS networks.
• 2 years system test experience.

Programming Experience:

• In Languages: C, C++, hack, php, ocaml, rust, perl, Java, python, UNIX shells.
• On Operating Systems: Linux, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Win32.
• Experience with all phases of the product lifecyle.
• Experience with Scrum methodology.

Work Experience:

October 2023 to October 2024: Slack (a Salesforce company)

• Maintained and upgraded Slack's installation of hhvm/hack.
• Helped users of the hack language at Slack debug difficult issues and educated them on quirks of the language.
• Helped organise and host an internal series of talks for Slack engineers called Code Club.
  Code Club was held on zoom every 2 weeks, with wide ranging topics of interest to engineers such as how Slack used various technologies and how Slack runs UX research studies.

October 2016 to January 2023: Facebook/Meta

• As a member of the hhvm team, I helped to maintain and to improve the performance of hhvm: the compiler and runtime for the hack programming language.
• I participated in the oncall rotation for hhvm. This oncall is responsible for both:
  • Deploying new versions of hhvm to Facebook/Meta's entire web server fleet.
  • Providing 24/7 support to teams that operate the web fleet in the event of crashing or other misbehavior from the runtime, or in the event of issues with the compiler blocking the continuous automated deployment of hack code to the web server fleet.
• During my time on the hhvm team we forked the hack language from PHP and began evolving it independently.
  • I contributed to the design, implementation, testing, and rollout of new hack language features.
  • I contributed to projects to automatically migrate code off of certain features inherited from PHP that were considered undesirable, and the subsequent removal of those features from the hack language.
• The hhvm team (and related teams) at Facebook/Meta was also responsible for providing support to other software engineers at the company using the hack language to build products.
  • During my time with the team, I was always one of the most active respondents in our internal support groups.
  • Additionally, when a deeper engagement with another team was needed (e.g. helping teams develop extensions or working with the IDE team on integrated debugging) I frequently volunteered to take on this work.
• In my last year at the company, I took over responsibility for hhvm's open source presence: making sure we were publishing stable releases on a steady cadence, keeping our public documentation updated, keeping up with bug reports from the community, and releasing security patches as needed.
  I led a team with 2 other engineers to accomplish these open source tasks.

June 2011 to September 2016: Bronto Software

• As team lead of the Sending team, responsible for the Bronto email sending infrastructure, including the MTA cluster and all code that determines delivery recipients, generates personalized email content, sends mail, and handles bounces and other feedback.
• I had primary responsibility for the architecture, availability, and capacity planning of this infrastructure.
• Our team managed our own part of the production environment, including system configuration, code deployment and monitoring/on call.
• Previously, as a member of the Production Software team, responsible for managing code deployments, finding and fixing critical bugs, developing internal tools and continuously monitoring the health of the Bronto SaaS application.

December 2010 to April 2011: American Research Institute

• Developed, tested and maintained ARI's e-learning and Video on Demand applications.

November 2006 to November 2010: Message Systems

• Performed system test planning, execution and automation for Message Systems Momentum and Message Central product lines.
• One of the two designer/implementors of Message Systems integrated SMS functionality (Mobile Momentum).
• Designed, developed, tested and maintained the Message Systems MTA (A.K.A. Ecelerity).
• Designed and implemented new generation configuration subsystem allowing for transactional online configuration changes on a running instance.
• Worked closely with customers in creating customer-specific extensions to product capabilities.
• Participated in DKIM interoperability testing event hosted by ALT-N on behalf of Message Systems.

June 2005 to October 2006: Gemini Security Solutions

• Preformed security reviews of, and wrote security configuration guides for a variety of products.
• Wrote a threadsafe, caching NTLM single-signon (via Samba against ActiveDirectory) authentication plugin for Sun's iPlanet web server.
• Ported a threadsafe, caching PKI authentication plugin from iPlanet to Apache and repaired portions of the underlying PKI library.

April 2003 to June 2005: Tecore Wireless Systems

• Lead developer in the System Test Automation group.
• Point of contact to several upstream software and hardware vendors. Responsibilities include maintenance, troubleshooting and issue tracking for all instances of those vendors' product.
• As one of two system administrators at Tecore, installed, maintained and supported Linux and Windows servers and workstations.
• Technical lead on GPRS integration project at Tecore, as part of System Test group.
• Wrote test plans and preformed feature and regression testing on several products as a member of the System Test group.