# Alex Levinson > Tech Lead at Tock Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/alexlevinson Full Stack (Backend focused) Engineer # Primary Languages: Java/Kotlin, Javascript/Typescript, SQL # Familiar Tools: - IDE: IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio - Frontend Frameworks: React, Redux, Material UI - WebRequest Frameworks: GraphQL, REST, Protobuf, gRPC, SOAP, XML, JSON, ApolloEngine - Database Tools: Hibernate, SQL (Oracle, Postgres, MariaDB) - Networking Tools: AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes (K8s), Docker, Feign, Postman, Charles, Nginx, Ngrok - Async Job Tools: Temporal, Jenkins, Lambda - Platform Configuration: Terraform, Helm, Ansible - 3rd Party Integrations: Braintree (Paypal), Stripe, Google Drive, Twilio Buzzwords: Microservice Architecture, Cloud, Component Library, Test Driven Development, Mentor, Interviewer, Self-Starter, Driven ## Work Experience ### (L5.5) Senior Software Engineer Technical Lead @ Tock Jan 2023 – Present | Chicago, Illinois, United States ### (L5) Senior Software Engineer @ Tock Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | Chicago, Illinois, United States Independent contributor in charge of several large scale projects with vague requirements and little oversight. Started as the junior member of a team of 2, ended as the second-most senior in a team of 10 with two indirect reports. Created and lead a monthly "Level Up" course, with a classroom style on complex topics. Guarded the frontlines as a member of the 8-person SRE on-call rotation (24h) which handled live production incidents for the entire site. Promoted mid cycle 2023. ### (L4) Software Dev Engineer 3 - Lodging Team @ Expedia Group Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Greater Chicago Area My work on the Hotel's team garnered the interest of a manager there and he pulled me in and promoted me in the process. It was for another small team, the Vacation Rental team. We were focused on the subset of properties that were a part of VRBO, owned by Expedia. How to highlight and display these along with our regular inventory matched up with my experience on the packages team. I built out a new request pattern to provide additional unique key value pairs for properties to display on the hotel search page. Which was also reusable on the room selection page. You can imagine the room selection page for a hotel being quite different from what you might see on a vacation rental house. Due to a restructure though, the Hotels team became Lodging and our focus was no longer only on vacation rentals. I began to outgrow my role at Expedia, but openings for senior positions were few and far between with engineers waiting longer than I. Leaving was bittersweet. ### (L3) Software Dev Engineer 2 - Package Team @ Expedia Group Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Chicago I began work @ Expedia on the package team. While Expedia sells flights, hotels, and cars; the package team works with any combination of the three. While this seems simple at a glance, Expedia was in a stage of rapid growth and experimentation. Each team's frontend code was a different toolset in a different repository with different approval committees. I worked in Java, FTL, Handlebars, React, Ember, and Marionette. Since our code crossed all of these, I regularly had to design migration strategies and testing plans. Including designing an Nginx setup for our team to run multiple of the apps simultaneously for testing. I architected a way for us to move out of ruby cucumber (since we had no ruby developers) and into nightwatchJS without losing our existing Gerkin tests. Then as the company began to move into the cloud, I started working on a series of lift and shift migrations to move backend code out of the monolith. Finally I began working closely with the hotels team as they moved into an entirely new mobile-first progressive web app design. Written with React, GraphQL, and Kotlin microservices. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Microsoft Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Redmond, Washington Summer Intern on the OneNote API team. Project was involved with a broken part of an existing tool. Turning their notebooks into html worked, but images didn't because they required authorization to request the URLs. I created a randomized guid and cached a limited time access token in redis. Browser would load the new URLs with the guid, and auth for an image would be skipped if the key was included and it was in the cache. I also worked on using phantomJS to create a snapshot of the html page for regression tests and for thumbnail tooling. Lastly, I refactored a large portion of their codebase to stop using lambdas. They were unnecessary for the space and made debugging a multi-threaded experience. ### Summer IT Intern @ GE Capital Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | AMSTC (Advanced Manufacturing and Technology Center) ### Mathematics Tutor @ Mathnasium - The Math Learning Center Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Blue Ash, Ohio Tutored K-12 Kids in Mathematics ranging from Arithmetic to Calculus. ### Sandwich Artist @ Jimmy John's Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 Took orders, delivered sandwiches, and made sandwiches. ## Education ### Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer Science Engineering University of Michigan Jan 2012 – Jan 2016 ### High School Diploma Cincinnati Country Day School Jan 1999 – Jan 2012 ### Summer Classes Stanford University Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alex-levinson-b9b6b572 - Website: http://levinsonalex.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/alexlevinson JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alexlevinson/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22