As a subsidiary of Amazon, we organize ourselves around the same values and principles as our parent company. One of these is consistently hiring the very best people. Our team at Alexa has been growing steadily over the last two years, and we’re thrilled to add so many new Alexans who raise the bar.
These are our four freshest faces:
Ross Del Duca, Dev Ops Engineer
Ross brings nearly 20 years of Dev Ops experience to Alexa. Day-to-day he builds and optimizes solutions for operational stability, but it’s his inquisitiveness and desire to challenge existing processes that sets him apart. Because of his expertise, Alexa can support existing products more efficiently and deliver new products more effectively.
Along with keeping Alexa running smoothly, Ross enjoys spending time with his 3 kids around the city, and is an avid cyclist. He loves the variability of the terrain in the city, and we’ve happily recruited him for the annual Team Bike Challenge! (2015 Small Company category champs! Huzzah!)
Fun Fact: Every year Ross joins the Cascade Bicycle Club on its annual 2 day, 212-mile trip from Seattle to Portland. He’ll mount up again this July!
Christina Pavlopoulou, Sr. Research Scientist
This native of Athens, Greece gives a whole new meaning to girl power. After moving to the US to pursue her MS in Computer Science at Purdue, she followed with a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a post-doc at Boston College. Here, her research included observing the interaction between computer vision and human vision. Coming to us from Xerox PARC, Christina brings a wealth of experience in machine learning and artificial intelligence monitoring to our data science team. Her expertise helps Alexa create clarity around how people use the web, and create a foundation for the features you use today! Aside from her incredible technical prowess, her solid taste in the classics (Queen, Radiohead, and Nick Drake) and love for movies make her a sure fire fit for Alexa!
Hiro Shimozato, Director of Product Management
With more than 10 years of consumer tech product management experience and a portfolio of name brands like Dolby, Jawbone, Avid, and Mattel, Hiro is the eyes and ears of the customer. His monomaniacal focus on the user journey, as well as his ability to distill their complex needs, has produced hundreds of millions of dollars in product revenues, with several products reaching number one in their category. Now, he’s bringing that same customer advocacy to Alexa to help shape our next generation of analytics tools.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Hiro holds a BS in International Relations and a BS in Music Recording from the University of Southern California. In his spare time he coaches soccer and keeps his love of music humming as guitarist in a local band.
Kim Cooper, Sr. Marketing Manager
When it comes to full stack marketers, Kim is the real deal. With 12 years experience in demand generation, content marketing, and campaign management, her skill set is as deep as it is wide. In her previous role at the SaaS company Rignite, she helped grow the company’s user base by 7x year over year and doubled organic leads in only 3 months. Her expertise also helped take another international startup from nothing to $1.2 million in revenue in just 3 years. Alexa is thrilled to welcome Kim to its growing team.
Along with a strong background in growing companies, Kim is partial to coffee, hiking anywhere in the world she lands (whether it’s in California or Nicaragua or New York), and documentaries about food, health, and nature.
