Alex Basson
Director Of Engineering at Primer.ai
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlex Basson is a director of engineering and former math educator with 13 years in professional software development and a prior decade-plus teaching background, now based in New York City. He blends deep hands‑on full‑stack expertise—backend systems in Java/Kotlin, C#, Rails and Node and frontends in React, Angular and native iOS/Android—with a track record of delivering production software for over 25 clients ranging from nonprofits to Fortune 20 enterprises. A practiced engineering manager, he has led and scaled teams up to a dozen engineers, using data-driven approaches like DORA metrics and SRE practices to prioritize reliability and measure delivery. He frequently pairs architecture and mentorship, running workshops on Domain-Driven Design, XP, and test-driven development while modernizing legacy systems into cloud-native microservices. An active open-source contributor, his iOS work includes improvements to Apple’s ResearchKit consent flows and tests for the Quick testing framework, showing a focus on clean design, dependency injection and testability. Unusually, his career is rooted in math pedagogy—he once embedded programming into AP Calculus curricula—which informs his emphasis on precise thinking and concrete, incremental skill-building for teams.
13 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
M.A. Mathematics, M.A. Mathematics at Washington University in St. LouisA.B. Mathematics, A.B. Mathematics at University of Chicago
Spanish
Stackoverflow
11,147reputation
539kreached
19answers
22questions
Github Skills (19)
unit-testing10
researchkit10
ios10
testing10
test-framework10
swift10
objective-c9
ui-design9
front-end-development9
pdf-generation9
uid9
bdd8
html6
documents6
xcode6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
Quick/Quick
Jun 2014 - Jun 2014
The Swift (and Objective-C) testing framework.
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:13 commits, 1 comment in 7 days
Contributions summary:Alex's contributions primarily involve adding and modifying test cases within the `quick/quick` repository, a Swift testing framework. They implemented new matchers, such as `BeSameInstanceAs` and `BeIdenticalTo`, and updated existing tests to reflect these changes. Their work demonstrates a focus on extending the framework's capabilities and ensuring its functionality through comprehensive testing.
cocoapodsobjective-ctesting-frameworktestingbdd
ResearchKit/ResearchKit
May 2015 - May 2015
ResearchKit is an open source software framework that makes it easy to create apps for medical research or for other research projects.
Role in this project:Mobile Developer (iOS)
Mobile Developer (iOS)Contributions:7 commits, 3 PRs, 1 comment in 10 days
Contributions summary:Alex primarily focused on developing and testing features within the ResearchKit framework, specifically related to consent forms. Their work involved implementing modal presentation styles and refactoring code to allow for dependency injection, indicating a focus on improving code structure and user interface presentation. They also added tests for ORKConsentDocument's methods, specifically testing the PDF generation logic, and introduced formatters for consent sections and signatures.
open-source-softwareresearchkitmedicalsoftware-framework
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