Alpha Amatya joined the Simons Foundation in 2014 to lead ongoing and new software development efforts. As the director of software engineering for SPARK (Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research), she is instrumental in working with the internal staff and external vendors and building and managing the internal engineering team. She is responsible for the system architecture, specification, design and development of the SPARK system and manages planning, organizing and executing the software implementation of various applications for SPARK. Amatya holds a B.S. in mathematics with a minor in computer science from Washington College in Maryland and an M.S. in computer science from Pace University in New York.