Alex Spies
Principal Industrial Engineer at Northrop Grumman
Watertown, South Dakota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAlex Spies is a Principal Industrial Engineer and project manager with four years of experience delivering large-scale federal construction programs and a technical background in mechanical engineering and engineering management. He has overseen portfolios up to $350M for the US Army Corps of Engineers, coordinating multi-agency design reviews, FAR-compliant contracting, and Small Business set-asides while keeping projects within congressional scope and budget. Equally comfortable with hands-on engineering and program leadership, he served as a Contracting Officer Representative on concurrent $100M projects and built cost, schedule, and change-management discipline across teams. Alex also contributes to high-profile open-source back-end work—helping improve ElasticSearch's ESQL engine by implementing expression features and hardening error handling—showing a blend of field engineering rigor and software architecture aptitude. Based in Watertown, SD, he pairs military-grade project governance with a practical, data-informed approach to risk and stakeholder coordination. Colleagues describe him as a detail-oriented planner who anticipates constructability and compliance issues before they become blockers.
4 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Degree, Engineering Management, Master's Degree, Engineering Management at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
elasticsearch-api10
javas10
elasticsearch10
elasticsearchquery10
junit10
aws-elasticsearch10
architectures10
back-end-development10
java10
architecture10
jtest10
amazon-elasticsearch10
exception-handling9
code-optimization9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/elasticsearch
Aug 2023 - Apr 2025
Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Software Architect
Back-end Developer & Software ArchitectContributions:1473 reviews, 377 PRs, 105 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Alex made significant contributions to the ElasticSearch (ESQL) project, focusing on back-end development tasks. Their work involved implementing and enabling arithmetic negation in expressions, which included adding new expression mappers, tests, and validations. Further, the user addressed vulnerabilities by replacing assertion errors with more robust exception handling and contributed to new features such as adding the CEIL function. Overall, the user demonstrated a strong understanding of the project's architecture and contributed to the stability and functionality of the ESQL engine.
restfulsearch-engineopensearchelasticsearchjava
alex-spies/elasticsearch
Aug 2023 - Apr 2025
Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
Contributions:4 PRs, 1013 pushes, 442 branches in 1 year 8 months
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