EXPERIENCE

The Washington Post — Staff Software Engineer, Creator XP | 2020 - present

Collaborate with data and graphics reporters to build and maintain scrapers and analysis tools that power reporting projects, including AI-driven video analysis for an ongoing investigation.
Partnered with editors to design 'First Edit,' an AI-powered editorial assistant that streamlines fact-checking and source verification workflows, reducing story production time while maintaining journalistic standards.
Developed benchmarking methodologies adopted by engineering teams to objectively evaluate journalistic accuracy of AI features.
Rearchitected The Post's email platform that powers breaking news alerts and flagship newsletters including Post Most and The 7. Cut delivery time by 75% while enabling personalized content for millions of readers during critical election coverage.
Led a committee of individual contributors and managers to develop a new skills matrix and leveling criteria for a 100+ person engineering department, fostering transparency and consistency in career development.

Led 20-engineer team building healthcare analytics platform used to uncover patterns in patient data, including HCA's COVID-19 registry that tracked pandemic outcomes across 180+ hospitals.
Developed an extract, transform, load (ETL) pipeline of microservices to replace a monolithic web app. Reduced month-long data loads to a single day while reducing AWS costs by 25%.
Defined process for software design, development, documentation, and automated testing. This led to our first Food and Drug Administration (FDA) software validation certification, allowing us to submit real world evidence (RWE) for drug development.

Researched and developed a near-real-time search and analytics platform to support more than 2 million unique patients with over 8 billion documents.
Tech lead for a cross-functional Scrum team, managing the delivery of multiple web apps. Created technical designs; broke down, planned and delegated tasks; and peer-reviewed others' work.

Lead iOS developer of the iPhone app Winston; a speech-enabled conversational assistant that summarized its users’ social feeds and news interests. App received a 4+ star rated app with 74,000 downloads, was featured on the main page of the App Store under ‘Bite-Sized News’ during the week of Feb. 7, 2014.

Built an open-source web app with a cross-disciplinary team of visual/sound engineers and psychologists. The app performed subjective Quality of Experience testing on the effects of degradation in video and sound quality on comprehension. Findings were used to set industry standards for streaming media on the web.

O’Connor, Niall, Mickey Alan Correll, Kathryn Hopkins, McGill, Luke Connors and Daniel Schlauch. Data Integration Using Graph Structures. U.S. Patent Application 16/298,748, filed Mar. 11, 2019, issued Feb. 18, 2020

Catellier, Andrew A. and Luke Connors. NTIA Handbook HB-14-501 Web-Enabled Subjective Test (WEST) Research Tools Manual. Boulder: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2014.
Web-Enabled Subjective Test (WEST), Boulder: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 2014. Available at https://github.com/NTIA/WEST.

Associate editor for the 2020 Boston Pride Guide, the official annual publication of Boston Pride. Responsible for recruiting contributors, selecting pieces for the publication, and editing articles.

Led 70+ volunteers producing New England’s largest LGBTQ Festival attended by 150,000+ people. Served as Associate Editor for 2020 Boston Pride Guide, recruiting contributors and editing articles.

Organized and trained volunteers in voter retention canvasing. In 2018, Massachusetts voters faced the first-ever statewide popular vote on protections for transgender people from discrimination. With our help, voters in Massachusetts upheld the existing nondiscrimination law.

Dean’s List College of Engineering: Spring 2014, Fall 2013, Spring 2013, Fall 2012, Spring 2012, Fall 2010 - Spring 2014