Alexei Solodovnicov

TomTom Germany GmbH

Nov 2021 – present

Group Staff Engineer

Joined as Senior Engineer and was promoted to Expert, Staff and Group Staff within five years. Team Lead since 2023.

• Came up with, designed and built a drop-in replacement for the production map pipeline. It runs without Databricks and most of the Azure infrastructure, delivers 6TB of Orbis map products 1.5x faster at a tenth of the cost, and saves about 200K a year.
• Two patents pending for a two-tier storage design that maps hundreds of billions of items in both directions with constant-time and amortized constant-time lookups, the foundation of Orbis map delivery in the OSM PBF format.
• Designed a Bring-Your-Own-Data solution for a team in another business unit at about $20 per product instead of the ~$2K originally proposed; the work received an internal collaboration award.
• Brought the lead time of a Databricks pipeline down from 31 to 10 hours.
• Parallelized the world map country cutting, so it takes 10x less time and 2.5x less compute.
• Improved the OpenLR decoding algorithm, cutting memory use by 60% and runtime by 50% on production jobs (O(N log N) to O(N log K) time for K << N, O(1) space). Contributed the change back to tomtom-international/openlr.
• Halved the build time of the NDS map compiler tool assembly, from 20 to 10 minutes.
• Stood in as Engineering Manager for over three months during a leadership change.
• Run sessions in the TomTom Mentorship Program on Spark, Databricks, AI and algorithmic problem solving.