Alexander Petros

Education

Dartmouth College
Bachelor of Arts, Government and Computer Science Sep 2015 – Jun 2019
  • Honors Thesis in Government: Tracing how evolving norms of espionage apply to cybersecurity today.
  • James O. Friedman Presidential Scholar

Employment

Internal Revenue Service
Information Technology Specialist (Systems Analysis) Oct 2024 – Present
  • Launched the new IRS Tax Withholding Estimator from start to finish in nine months, with full support for 2026 tax law. I built the prototype and then led the project through design, implementation, and testing, securing sign-off from stakeholders across IRS and Treasury.
  • Collaborated with tax policy experts to establish a rigorous, automated, and transparent testing process to ensure the estimator’s accuracy. This work enabled the first Tier 3 open-source projects at IRS.
  • Managed a cross-functional delivery team of approximately 30 full-time employees and contractors.
  • Modularized and expanded the Direct File tax engine for use in lightweight, static websites.
  • Tech Stack: Scala, Web Components, JS, CSS, Java, ReactJS, PostgreSQL, Splunk, Datadog, AWS Services
Freelance Software Consulting
Self-employed Sep 2021 – Present
  • Consulting engineer for non-tech companies that need reliable, maintainable web services.
  • Built a web registration system that processed over $1.5mil in revenue in one calendar year.
  • Reduced operating cost by 20x on a live full-stack web service by migrating it from MongoDB to SQLite.
  • Reduced the average request time of a web service by 100x, while dramatically improving its functionality, by replacing the React frontend with HTML templates and a hypermedia API.
  • Tech Stack: HTML, CSS, SQLite, NodeJS, PHP, htmx, Digital Ocean, fly.io
The Washington Post
Engineering Lead Sep 2022 – Apr 2023
Senior Software Engineer Oct 2021 – Sep 2022
Software Engineer Jun 2021 – Oct 2021
  • Resurrected and modernized the freelance operations platform, a Java + AngularJS monolith that had been in maintenance mode since 2017.
  • Led a group of engineering, newsroom, and finance stakeholders to plan product roadmap.
  • Built a fully automated CI/CD with containerized builds, a full test suite, and multi-region deployment.
  • Mitigated key vulnerabilities by implementing SSO, encryption-at-rest, and reverse proxies.
Amazon
Software Development Engineer II Mar 2021 – Jun 2021
Software Development Engineer I Sep 2019 – Mar 2021
  • Reduced average request latency from 1500 to 400ms by parallelizing requests, modeling expected thread usage based on predicted traffic—which functioned during peak holiday load without incident.
  • Designed, implemented, and documented Alexa Video APIs for Echo Show Devices, used by 3P partners