About me

Email: alexandru at tandrau dot com

Nationality: Romanian

Date of Birth: 13/11/1988

Place of Birth: Tirgoviste, Romania

Experience

10/2009 to date: GBT Systems
Development Consultant at GolfTripGenius.com, an Internet start-up covering uncharted territory for software companies: the intricacies of a golf trip.

Responsibilities initially included improving and implementing an algorithm for the division of golfers into groups – an NP-complete problem. The previous solution involved linear programming techniques, but was too slow for real-time usage. A heuristic approach was pointed by UPenn academia, and the algorithm has grown into a complete solution for golf-trips.

After the algorithm implementation I have continued to work with GBT Systems to build a complete web-service (Ruby on Rails, Javascript and AJAX), a tool for generation of trip albums and an iPhone application (Objective C).

10/2009 – 12/2010: 123Linkit.com
Chief Technical Officer at 123LinkIt, an Internet start-up allowing bloggers to streamline the affiliate marketing process by analyzing their blog post content and transforming relevant keywords and product links into affiliate links. Bloggers earn more passive income while receiving the added benefit of saving time on advertising.

Responsibilities include managing a small team of developers and graphical designers to build a website (Ruby On Rails, JS), a content analysis service (Ruby) and a WordPress plugin (PHP).

06/2010 – 08/2010: Google Germany Gmbh, Munich, Germany
Software Engineering Intern with Code Search, Google’s solution for indexing and searching the worlds’ source code.

Responsibilities include designing and implementing a new ranking algorithm for identifying code-related searches on google.com. Implementation was done in C++, adhering to strict Google programming guidelines, touching large areas of source code not owned by CodeSearch team and maintaining constant communication with all other implied teams.

07/2009 – 09/2009: Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA
Software Development Engineer Intern with Microsoft Business Division, Microsoft Office – Global Experience.

Responsibilities include designing and implementing an internal tool for performance analysis and data interpretation. PerfStudio makes use of thousands of performance profiles obtained in laboratory tests, creates visualizations and pinpoints problematic functions or source-code areas. Implementation was done in Microsoft Visual C# and other Microsoft-internal tools – performance profilers, OLAP cubes, etc.

Research and project experience

01/2010 – 06/2011: Jacobs-University Bremen
Teaching assistent to Prof. Dr. Juergen Schoenwaelder with Operating Systems class. My responsibilities include grading homeworks, exams and helping the students grasp the material.

09/2008 to date: Infoarena

I am currently a member of the Infoarena association, a non-profit organization which helps students (primary school to college) to develop their algorithmic skills. The team, consisting of 20 people with remarkable results at National and International competitions, manages the website and organizes contests. The website currently features 800 problems and an online-judge and is supported by community of almost 10000 members.

Education

09/2011 to date: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland – MSc. in Computer Science

09/2008 – 06/2011: Jacobs University Bremen, Germany – BSc. in Computer Science

09/2006 – 06/2008: International Computers High School of Bucharest

High school education specializing in Computer Science. Received merit-based scholarship for results in National and International Competitions. Computer Science preparation classes taught by laureates of International Olympiads in Informatics.

09/2004 – 06/2006: “Avram Iancu” High School, Cluj Napoca, Romania

Skills and achievments

Languages: Romanian (native), English (fluent), German (basic)

Programming: C/C++, C#, PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, Ajax, Ruby On Rails

Further education: 2006 – Oracle Academy – Introduction to Oracle 9i: SQL. My team’s project, “an ERD for RentACoder”, came first in the regional competition.

Awards:

  • Bronze Medal, Balkan Olympiad in Informatics 2008, Macedonia
  • 8th place, Northwestern European Programming Contest 2008, Netherlands
  • Part of National Informatics Team of Romania 2007, 2008 (9th and 6th out of 24)
  • Silver Medal, National Olympiad in Informatics, Romania, 2008
  • Second Prize, National Olympiad in Informatics, Romania, 2005
  • Google CodeJam, SemiFinalist, 2008
  • TopCoder High-School finalist, 2007, 2008
  • Other National and Municipal prizes and Honorable Mentions in Informatics, Mathematics and Physics

Interests: Interested in the technology start-up scene. I enjoy driving, traveling and watching movies. I occasionally swim and play chess.