# Alex Wang > iOS Developer @ Meta | Previously Coursera, Perplexity AI Location: Milpitas, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/alexwang Software engineer with a focus on mobile and UI/UX design. I enjoy tackling the big problems with developing for small screens. Currently at Meta, where I'm working on leveraging Meta AI to help people better connect with their friends on Messenger and Facebook. Previously, I was a mobile developer at Perplexity and Coursera. Graduated from Stanford University with a dual degree in computer science (HCI focus) and music (piano performance). I also enjoy tinkering with small one-off webpages or Discord bot integrations in my free time. My goal is to make difficult things simple, and ordinary things beautiful. Outside of coding, I also enjoy photography, video work, and music! Specialties: Computer Languages: Swift and SwiftUI, Objective C (iOS SDK), Python, C, C++, Java Web Development: Experience in HTML5, JavaScript (React, jQuery, and regular vanilla JS), CSS, PHP/Hack, SQL, Ruby on Rails HCI and User Experience: Experience with user needfinding, heuristic evaluations, A/B testing Media Creation and Manipulation: Regularly uses Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and DaVinci Resolve Languages: Fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese, elementary Japanese Music education: Piano performance (17 years), music theory and composition (9 years) ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Meta Jan 2023 – Present | Menlo Park, California, United States iOS developer working on Messenger and Meta AI ### Senior Software Engineer • iOS Technical Staff @ Perplexity AI Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area - Main developer on the Perplexity AI iOS app, implementing core features on both the UI/UX and infrastructure aspects with SwiftUI, UIKit, CoreData, and WebSockets. ### Senior Software Engineer • Frontend Development @ Coursera Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area - Implemented versioning of course items so instructors can view changes between each iteration for videos, readings, assessments, and other course items. ### Senior Software Engineer • iOS Development @ Coursera Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area One of four iOS developers on the Mobile Learning Experience team for the Coursera iOS app, seen by tens of thousands of users daily. - Led the rewrite of the quiz and assessments experience to use CoreData and improved page load times by 2x, while increasing developer efficiency by making the feature more easily extendable and maintainable. - Headed the project to render rich text in-app quickly and reliably from Coursera’s own markup language using WKWebViews and JavaScript. Worked with the backend teams to migrate to using HTML so rendering logic can be simplified on both iOS and Android. - Created new interviewing processes and guidelines for mobile developers to focus more on practical experience on iOS and Android with small take-home projects over standard whiteboarding questions. - Implemented a streamlined learner dashboard so users can easily and quickly glance through their progress and continue with course items - Support Coursera's online degrees on the mobile platform by making it more discoverable while maintaining an engaging and stable experience whether the user is online or offline - Led the process of migrating the iOS code base from Swift 3 to Swift 4.2 ### Software Engineer • iOS Development @ Coursera Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area iOS developer on the Learning Experience team for the Coursera iOS app, seen by tens of thousands of users daily. Worked a large number of features in Swift including: - Lead on redesigning and implementing the mobile course experience, including the course outline and discussion forums, resulting in a 5-10x speedup in loading time as well as increased user engagement - Designed and implemented a GraphQL client on the data networking layer, which reduces the number requests made by a view from dozens to one or two - Led the team on migrating the iOS codebase from Swift 2 to Swift 3 - Overhauled a script that automates in-app purchase submissions to Apple's iTunesConnect to verify and submit newly published courses and specializations, cutting the time required by 3 hours - Main developer on supporting peer review assessments on mobile - Migrated webview components to render natively for over an 10x speedup in performance for readings and other text-based components - Created reusable and visually delightful UI goodies such as stretchable table headers and onboarding animations ### Co-Founder @ Chromatiqa Jan 2010 – Jan 2015 | Fremont, California - Founded, developed, and managed a website and a music game, Notedrop that averages 2000 unique visitors a month and has over 230,000 plays. (http://notedrop.chromatiqa.org) (2010 – present) - Created a web application for a social network with PHP and jQuery for sharing pictures and ratings of food for Stanford’s Introduction to Human Computer Interaction course. Currently developing an iOS port of the application. (http://nibbler.chromatiqa.org) (2012) - Prototyped a new visually-rich Twitter experience for iOS in Objective-C (2014) ### Mobile Engineer Intern @ Yelp Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Mobile backend engineer - Improved the speed of sharing businesses and reviews on Yelp by 5x by migrating requests to the Open Graph Object API - Extended mobile metrics for more specific and improved tracking of devices ### Mobile Engineering Intern @ Yahoo! Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Sunnyvale, CA iOS developer on the Yahoo News Digest application - Worked as one of the first developers, rapidly prototyping and shipping the app six months later - Implemented the daily digest and article views in Objective-C with performant and reusable information cards (e.g. slideshows, maps, related Tweets) - Worked closely with designers on UI and UX design to make the app a winner of the 2014 Apple Design Award ### Medical Information Department Intern @ Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Kaohsiung, Taiwan - Designed and developed a complete iOS application for Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital for patient registration, cancellation, doctor lookup, and other features optimized for the iPhone and iPad - Learned about the framework of KMUH's IPD-2 (In-patient Department Orders) and KMUH's Electronic Prescription Services in order to improve efficiency and accuracy of patient care and medicine prescriptions - Knowledge of office and hospital business culture and practices in Taiwan ### Summer Research Intern @ Stanford University School of Medicine Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Stanford, California - Studied and worked on stem cells research in Professor Christopher K. Zarin’s laboratory under the guidance of Oscar J. Abilez, M.D. Studied how levels of BMP-4, C-KIT, and KDR change over time as human induced pluripotent stem cells differentiate into cardiomyocytes. (2011 and 2010 summer) ## Education ### Dual Degree: B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Music in Human Computer Interaction, Piano Performance Stanford University ### Irvington High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alexywang --- Source: https://flows.cv/alexwang JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alexwang/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01