Alex Chao
Founding | Senior Software Engineer
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About
Senior JavaScript / TypeScript Engineer with 8+ years of experience building modern web applications and AI-powered platforms. Strong expertise in React, Next.js, Vue, and TypeScript, with hands-on experience developing scalable frontends and full-stack services that integrate LLMs, AI search, and data pipelines. Skilled in designing high-performance UI architectures, reusable component systems, and API-driven applications that process large datasets and deliver real-time user experiences.
Experienced collaborating with product, AI, and backend teams to build production AI features such as semantic search, AI assistants, and automated analytics tools.
Experience
Lead Software Engineer at Exa (2024-12 – 2026-02)
Built AI-powered research tools and semantic search applications with LLM integration
- Built AI-powered research tools using React, Next.js, and TypeScript, enabling users to perform semantic search across large knowledge datasets.
- Developed interactive UI components that displayed LLM-generated summaries, insights, and citations in real-time.
- Implemented RAG-based AI workflows that combined search results with LLM reasoning to generate contextual answers.
- Built frontend state management and caching systems to handle large search results and asynchronous AI responses.
- Designed API integrations with backend services that performed embedding generation, search ranking, and AI inference.
- Optimized performance of large result sets through pagination, virtualization, and efficient query caching.
Senior Software Engineer at Amazon Ads (2022-07 – 2024-10)
Built data analytics dashboards and integrated machine learning services for marketing teams
- Built data analytics dashboards using React and TypeScript, enabling marketing teams to visualize campaign performance and behavioral insights.
- Developed reusable UI components and design systems used across internal marketing tools.
- Integrated frontend applications with machine learning services that predicted campaign performance and customer engagement.
- Implemented asynchronous API workflows to retrieve analytics datasets and render interactive data visualizations.
- Built backend API integrations for campaign management and analytics pipelines.
- Improved application performance by optimizing data fetching strategies and client-side caching.
Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times (2020-07 – 2022-07)
Developed frontend applications supporting content publishing and editorial analytics tools
- Developed frontend applications using React and JavaScript supporting content publishing and editorial analytics tools.
- Built dynamic dashboards used by editorial teams to analyze reader engagement and content performance.
- Implemented frontend integrations with recommendation and analytics APIs powered by machine learning systems.
- Built reusable UI components and page templates used across editorial platforms.
- Optimized UI performance for large datasets and real-time content updates.
- Collaborated with product and design teams to improve user experience and platform usability.
Software Engineer at Codesmith (2018-12 – 2020-06)
Built web applications for analytics and data visualization platforms
- Built web applications using React, Vue, and JavaScript, supporting analytics and data visualization platforms.
- Implemented UI components that rendered large analytical datasets and model outputs.
- Integrated frontend applications with backend services and machine learning APIs.
- Developed interactive dashboards that visualized predictive insights and system metrics.
- Implemented responsive UI designs supporting desktop and mobile platforms.
- Improved performance of frontend applications through code optimization and efficient state management.
Junior Frontend Developer at GraphQuill (2016-08 – 2018-11)
Built frontend applications and data visualization tools
- Built frontend applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
- Developed dashboards and visualization tools for data analysis.
- Integrated frontend systems with backend APIs.
- Improved performance and usability of user interfaces.
- Collaborated with engineers and designers to deliver features.
- Worked on maintaining production systems and fixing issues.
- Gained experience building real-world applications in production environments.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science – Northwestern University (2012-09 – 2016-06)
