Alvin's Resume

Education

August 2014 - December 2017

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering

San Jose State University

I got into San Jose State with a strong passion in electronics and building small fun projects as a hobby. Throughout my time studing with fellow classmates and working on projects in the IEEE club room, my interests in embedded systems grew! Before I knew it, I was working on building makeshift VR interactable gloves and infrared sensing cars!

August 2014 - December 2017

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

San Jose State University

During my time as San Jose State, I was required to take some programming courses to fulfill my Electrical Engineering graduation requirements, but this was my gateway into finding the fun in data structures. It reminded my of the joy I had when I was problem solving math problems. More specifically, Calculus II series. To determine a solution for a problem given within a time constraint can be complicated at times, but the joy I get from resolving the problem afterwards and growing from seeing better solutions to the problem makes it fun! I really enjoy the self growth I see from every problem I tackle and that made me really enjoy programming. Hence, I ended up double majoring in Computer Science during my time at San Jose State.

Experience

October 2020 - Present

Senior Database Engineer - SWAT

ServiceNow

October 2017 - September 2020

Engineer, Firmware Engineering

Western Digital

Designed and developed firmware drivers and application layer APIs for SSD products in C and C++
Designed and developed multiple unit testing, automation processes, and debugging tools in Python
Bad Block Management Module:

Improved the internal file system design to handle data and bad blocks more effectively
Designed and created the bad block isolation feature to avoid memory corruption

Power Management Module:

Improved the PMM driver by creating APIs to simplify voltage setting adjustments
Optimized PMM performance by developing a scripting tool to analyze power profile outputs
Developed a capacitance health monitoring system feature from end-to-end
Developed drivers to communicate with devices connected to the I2C peripheral bus
Created unit tests for file system and power management (PMM) to ensure proper memory blocks are utilized

Infrastructure Improvements:

Created multiple scripts to automate Firmware development builds for specific OEM requirements
Automation improved throughput time of these builds from 5 manual days down to a few computational hours
Developed a process to scan failing cases, classify them into priorities, and return a summary report
Root cause failing test cases, design and apply the fix, and create a bug summary report
Built scripting tools to analyze lines of code utilized and drive performance between different release builds

June 2017 - September 2017

Intern, Firmware Engineering

Sandisk, A Western Digital Brand

Developed internal firmware APIs for data transfer in the DDR module bring up of SSD products process in C and C++
Evaluated testing criteria and developed Unit Tests and Debugging Tools in C, C++, and Python
Analyzed failing test cases and worked with mentors to understand the failure, find the solution, and write a report
Created SQL queries to retrieve data from AWS database of logged failing drives to plot and analyze performance
Brought up FPGA (Field Programming Gating Array) development environments and conducted multilevel read/write tests

Skills

C

90^%

C++

90^%

Python

80^%

Embedded Systems

90%

Assembly Lanuage

60%

Mobile Development

60%

Electronic Prototyping

90%

Automation Scripting

80%

Debugging

80%

Alvin Ma

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