Alex Whitaker

Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI

San Francisco, California, United States

About

Experience

  • Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI
    Apr 2026 - Present · 3 mos

  • Founding Engineer at Tako
    Nov 2024 - Feb 2026 · 1 yr 4 mos

    Led frontend engineering @ tako.com

  • Canal (San Francisco, California, United States)
    • Product Engineering Lead
      Jan 2023 - Sep 2024 · 1 yr 9 mos

    • Engineering Manager
      May 2022 - Sep 2024 · 2 yrs 5 mos

    • Staff Software Engineer
      Jun 2021 - Jan 2023 · 1 yr 8 mos

  • Senior Software Engineer at Alto Pharmacy
    Jun 2020 - Jun 2021 · 1 yr 1 mo

  • Software Engineer at Airbnb
    Jul 2016 - May 2020 · 3 yrs 11 mos

    Product-oriented and data-driven engineer with a passion for cross-functional collaboration and A/B testing. Has worked primarily on user-facing product features for the Checkout, Search, and Guest Growth teams with additional full-stack work on Airbnb’s internal A/B experimentation framework. - Frontend engineer using mainly React with Javascript and Typescript - Co-led frontend development on a project to rebuild the checkout flow from the ground up, drastically simplifying the user experience and utilizing server-driven development to enable faster product experimentation - Led projects to improve Airbnb’s search experience, including multiple new search bars, filter UI improvements, and better content recommendations to improve discoverability of relevant Airbnb inventory - Sole engineer on a project to build a CDN-compatible A/B testing framework, enabling product experimentation on CDN-cached pages throughout the entire site - Built a framework to create customizable, user-personalized landing pages for SEM and SEO traffic, improving conversion of users entering Airbnb via search engine