Software Engineer, Amazon:
Jan 2021 – Present
I currently work at Amazon as part of the Advertising department, on the Accounts and Permissions team. We manage part of the Amazon Digital Service Platform, a service which allows users to launch and manage advertising campaigns. I’ve lead efforts to publish latency and traffic metrics for pages my team owns, and to onboard our service to translation services within Amazon to allow users to browse our pages in their native language. My other shorter term projects have all been to enhance the user experience on pages that we own within the DSP, and include full stack work with product and partner teams to deliver on that objective.
Software Engineer, MITRE:
Aug 2019 – Jan 2021
During my time at MITRE I worked on several different projects that allowed me to expand my expertise in front end development. While most of my work involved design and development GUIs for Python applications, I also had the opportunity to explore projects in the cybersecurity space, as well as get more familiar with Docker.
In my second year at MITRE, I led front end design on a prototype application as the sole front end developer. This was a great experience. Working closely with end user requests to shape the design of the UI was a really amazing feedback loop and made development feel extremely impactful, especially given that I had the sole responsibility to fulfill those requests. By the end of the project, I had expanded my reach beyond my role as the front end lead to include closer work with hardware teams and sensor/systems level data flow.
Intern, Elantron:
Over the summer of 2018 I worked remotely designing and implementing several different aspects of an application in C and C++. The application was designed to allow users to interact with a manual pick & place system for surface mount electronic components.
Initially I worked on mouse interaction, where I wrote a simple mouse driver to intercept input and allow us to manipulate that data to our needs. I later focused on designing different aspects of the application UI.
I learned a lot about self-management, specifically about working remotely. In addition, I was able to increase my knowledge of C, and apply it to a UI problem, which I had never done before. Working on UI was interesting, and I would be excited to work on this aspect of computer science in the future.
Research Assistant, Wilson Lab:
Over the summer of 2017, I worked in the Wilson Lab here at UMass. The Wilson Lab is part of a team that is working together to build a new telescope in Mexico called TolTec. This new telescope is significantly larger than any current operating millimeter-wavelength single dish telescope, and as a result, they will be recording significantly more data.
My job over the summer was to optimize the data pipeline so that it would be able to handle this increased amount of data. I worked using CUDA to multi-thread arithmetically intensive sections of code on the GPU to reduce overall runtime.
Through this experience I learned a lot about problems involved in large dataset acquisition and processing, and established that a GPU can be used effectively to handle these large datasets. I also learned a great deal about how to work with an extensive, unfamiliar code base, which is an invaluable lesson.
Research Assistant, Chesler Lab:
During the summers of 2013 through 2015, I worked in the Chesler Lab at the Jackson Laboratory. I started this work through the Jackson Laboratory’s Summer Science Program, a selective 10 week program where high school and college students participate in exciting research throughout the summer at Jax.
I worked under Dr. Chesler where I independently designed and built an operant conditioning chamber (a behavior testing chamber) using LEGO Robotics to study drug addiction. The goal of this project was to design a behavioral testing chamber for deployment in schools, as a means to teach students about the effects of drug addiction in a more hands-on and real world manner. Ultimately, I was able to design, build, and test the chamber on live mice. I also wrote code for the robotics and for the output data pipeline. An article describing the work was published on the front cover of the Jax Magazine, and on their website. Additionally, a manuscript describing the work was submitted for publication.
Andy Gallup 