James Florez

Hi! My name is James Florez, and I am an M.S. Computer Science student at Northeastern University graduating in December 2023. I am passionate about software and distributed systems, and I am looking for new grad Software Engineer positions. I have previous internship experience at Lyft (Summer 2023) where I created an ETL pipeline in Python to process the output of a computer vision model, and at Google (Fall 2022) where I built a SQL database to hold millions of records related to map accuracy and a C++ API for retrieval.

I also have a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA and I worked in the aerospace industry as a mechanical design engineer for 2.5 years. I designed high precision rotary sensors and cockpit controls for a variety of applications on commercial, private, and military aircraft and spacecraft. To support this, I taught myself LabVIEW and developed test software for the production and qualification testing of these products. Over time, I found that I was more interested in software development than mechanical engineering, and I decided to pursue graduate school and a career path in computer science.

Used DFS & BFS on a graph representing Boston to generate loop running routes containing the most points of interest given a distance and starting location. Implemented the program in Python and used the “geoplotlib” package with latitude/longitude data to plot routes.

Developed a video game in Java based on the “Kill Doctor Lucky” board game leveraging Model-View-Controller, Command, and Façade design patterns. The GUI was implemented with the Java Swing library and I followed test driven development best practices including unit testing with JUnit.

Developed a distributed ticket sale system in Java using remote method invocation with multiple clients and servers. Used fault-tolerant consensus (Paxos), leader election (bully algorithm), and time synchronization (Christian’s algorithm).

Built an ETL pipeline in R to extract XML PubMed article data and upload it to a transactional SQLite database. Created a separate R program to read transactional data from SQLite, process it, and load it to a fact table in a MySQL data warehouse designed for data mining and analysis.

Built a MySQL database on the AWS Relational Database Service platform containing aircraft bird strike data. Received raw data from FAA published CSV files and used R to format and load data to MySQL. Analyzed data using SQL queries to find patterns and determine preventative measures to reduce bird strikes.

Created an automated test software and electromechanical test station using LabVIEW 17 that communicates per the ARINC 429 standard leading to the company’s first Fly-By-Wire product. This was featured here on Sensata's LinkedIn page and has been displayed at aerospace trade shows across the country.

Developed new automated test programs for qualification and production testing and upgraded legacy programs from LabVIEW 6 to LabVIEW 17. I had no previous experience with LabVIEW, so I taught myself using online classes. To prove my competency, I took and passed the Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer Exam. I posted my certificate of completion on LinkedIn as well.

Designed and developed an autonomous robot with a team of six other students that can navigate through a complex environment, identify and collect ping pong balls, and dispense the balls by levitating them on an air current to a ping pong serving position. Responsible for ball storage subsystem and all software development including object recognition, movement, and autonomous decision-making. The source code can be found on my Github repo.

I first started 3D printing in my mechanical engineering courses at UCLA. Since then, it has become a hobby of mine and I have built my own FDM printer from a kit and upgraded it with a Raspberry Pi running Octoprint. I have also used these skills professionally as a mechanical engineer for rapid prototyping of new designs, creating test fixtures, and I even experimented with metal 3D printing for a lightweight sensor housing.