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Andrey Gavel

Staff software engineer and manager at Google

About

I'm a staff software engineer and manager at Google. I joined in 2017 to work on internal tools and infrastructure, and later moved into managing a team of software engineers working on developer relations projects.

Before Google, I built IVR systems and web portals at Swampfox Technologies, and spent five years at Design Information Technology moving Silverlight and WPF applications to the web and training new developers. I studied computer science at the University of South Carolina, where I also taught Java and Linux labs.

In my own time I make games that run in the browser, mostly card games.

Experience

Google

Jan 2017 to now

Staff Software Engineer & Manager. Generative AI, Data Insights, Tools & Infrastructure.

  • Manage a team of eight engineers and lead efforts across teams of project managers, data scientists, and UX designers.
  • Improve LLM and generative AI results across Google products via tooling to improve training data quality and availability.
  • Shape high-level product decisions by building tools to measure and surface product level data insights.
  • Lead development of content compiler, presentation, and delivery infrastructure for Google developer documentation platform.
  • Build Google-scale load and performance testing and UI testing tools and infrastructure.

Swampfox Technologies

Jan 2016 to Jan 2017

Software Engineer. IVR systems and web development.

  • Developed and maintained administrative web portals for configuring IVRs and related software, maintaining older Java Faces portals and building new ones with Spring and Angular.
  • Independently developed and maintained interactive voice response systems for major insurance, banking and utility companies, reducing their support costs and making their customer support more focused.
  • Supported partner companies through IVR maintenance and upgrades, helping their IT departments set up development environments and troubleshoot their systems.

Design Information Technology

Aug 2011 to Jan 2016

Software Engineer. .NET (Silverlight, WPF) and web development.

  • Trained 12 junior developers in HTML5, JavaScript and the ASP.NET web stack, moving the company from C# and Silverlight to modern web development.
  • Led a team of 12 junior developers in porting a C# and Silverlight application for electrical systems modeling and simulation to HTML5 and JavaScript, improving its usability and accessibility.
  • Worked with a web designer to plan and carry out the rewrite of a Silverlight asset management application in HTML5 and JavaScript, extending its life and making it usable on smartphones and tablets.
  • Oversaw four developers rewriting a freight-industry data visualization tool from a C++ desktop application to the web, so users could stream data instead of storing it locally.
  • Maintained a Silverlight and C# asset management application with two other developers, fixing bugs, improving performance and adding requested features.

SysEDA

May 2011 to Aug 2011

Software Engineer. .NET (Silverlight, WPF) and web development.

  • Maintained a mature C# and Silverlight application alongside five senior developers, learning common software development processes and patterns.

University of South Carolina

Nov 2009 to Jun 2014

Teaching Assistant and IT Specialist. Java and Linux labs, computer maintenance.

  • Taught an Algorithmic Design (Java) lab for two semesters with another graduate assistant, helping students with assignments and grading homework and exams.
  • Taught a full Unix and Linux fundamentals course, preparing students to use Linux as a software development environment.
  • Documented and carried out the setup of a Xen hypervisor on a Debian server, letting the university run several operating system instances on one machine.
  • Resolved technical issues for more than 30 staff in the financial aid department.
  • Maintained the financial aid department website with HTML5, JavaScript and PHP, fixing layout and back-end issues and adding content for students.

Education

University of South Carolina

  • Master of Engineering, Computer Science
  • Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

Projects

  • Solitaire Collection (2018 to now). Forty-one solitaire games in the browser, from Klondike and FreeCell to Pyramid, TriPeaks and Grandfather's Clock.
  • Spider Solitaire (2013). Spider Solitaire in the browser, drawn on canvas with KineticJS, with card sounds from howler.js.
  • Minesweeper (2016). Minesweeper in the browser, with lives, so one wrong click doesn't have to end the game.
  • Pong (2014). Pong in the browser, built on the Phaser game engine.
  • PATH (2014). PATH, the Personal App for Technology Help, is a clickable prototype that pairs products with simplified manuals and videos. Made for a Human Computer Interaction class.