Benjamin Pollack

I’m an accomplished and versatile technology leader with twenty years of experience spanning Senior Engineering Management, Architect, and hands-on Principal engineering roles. I’ve led and mentored teams, driven technical strategy, and solved complex problems across the full stack—from React and Node.js to low-level systems and cloud infrastructure. I’m a true generalist who thrives in startup environments, delivering high-impact projects and elevating engineering organizations.

Experience

ngrok – Remote – January 2025–Present

Principal Engineer

React, Go, TypeScript, Bazel, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes

• Added telemetry to our certificate issuance pipeline, and used it to reduce certificate issuance time by 80% and system cost by 70%
• Fixed broken Python and JavaScript SDK build processes, allowing the team to resume a regular release cadence for the first time in almost a year
• Added optional HIPAA-compliant encryption and operational modes to the product
• Expanded the Traffic Policy feature suite with key capabilities, such as issuing private requests to unexposed endpoints to support complex service-to-service routing

The Knot Worldwide – Remote – October 2022–December 2024

Zone Architect, Senior Engineering Manager

React, Redux, Node, PHP, Symfony, Postgres, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, RabbitMQ

As a Zone Architect:

• Assembled a plan to pay down our Zone’s development debt, including finding common issues with technologies and processes across multiple teams, achieving alignment on prioritization, and proposing solutions with timelines and level-of-effort to upper management
• Led incident response for critical production outages, including database overloads and cascading service failures, and implemented robust monitoring and data denormalization solutions to prevent recurrence
• Updated many unmaintained services to contemporary Node and Docker environments, and repaired bit-rotted build processes
• Worked on many day-to-day developer improvements for the company, including cutting build times for one of our products by 20%, scripting the development environment setup, restoring the ability to use xdebug for our PHP application, and writing a command-line tool to automate reserving and deploying to QA environments
• Worked with our data teams to clean up, normalize, and ingest large amounts of data scraped with AI tools
• Spearheaded the end-to-end overhaul of a critical pricing system, coordinating with product and three engineering teams to deliver a solution from database redesign to UI implementation

As a Senior Engineering Manager:

• Managed half of US-based Vendor engineering, comprising two teams and roughly 15 engineers
• Following an internal reorg, successfully guided teams through absorbing a large number of projects from other parts of the company
• As part of that effort, focused on both training teams on Node services and making additional hires to quickly level up one team’s expertise
• Coached a new manager through the transition from Principal into management, including guiding them through their first leveling and compensation adjustment cycles
• Improved team velocity by implementing agile best practices, including smaller PRs, earlier product-dev integration, and targeted mentorship, resulting in a measurable decrease in bugs and deployment friction.
• Led a team through shipping and rapidly iterating on a new vendor messaging system, including systematically and steadily moving legacy functionality over to the new product

Dooly – Remote – October 2021-October 2022

Senior Engineering Manager

Team used React, Node, Rails, Redux, Tachyon, Google Cloud Platform; introduced Terraform

• Reduced team cycle time by over 25% by streamlining ceremony and meetings, encouraging tighter integration between product/design and engineers, improving knowledge sharing and mentorship within the team, and empowering engineers to remove their own bottlenecks
• Architected and championed the creation of a new Platform team; developed the complete charter including staffing, KPIs, and initial roadmap, leading to its successful launch and adoption
• Helped design and lead a virtual engineering offsite/hack week that resulted in shipped workflow and product improvements
• Guided development and implementation of a standardized career path framework for all engineering ICs, including educating everyone on the new system, ensuring all engineers were appropriately re-leveled, and working with upper management to ensure compensation could be adjusted to match

Bakpax – Remote – December 2018-September 2021

Staff Software Engineer

React, Kotlin, TypeScript, Node, CSS, HTML5, Cypress, Apollo Client, GraphQL, Python, Elasticsearch, AWS, Terraform, DynamoDB, Bazel

• Developed and enhanced key features across the full stack, including content management, assignment submission, and search functionalities
• Improved performance across the app, including improving AWS Lambda performance, introducing client caching, and improving React performance
• Improved content discovery and marketability by writing Elasticsearch-based assignment and textbook search functionality, including cloud infrastructure, frontend and backend components, and internal documentation and administrative tooling
• Improved developer productivity and system performance by introducing new technologies, giving talks on best practices, and demonstrating their use in our code base, including ImmerJS, Apollo, React Hooks, and more
• Reduced alert fatigue and improved issue resolution time by integrating triage tools like Bugsnag and implementing a robust Cypress end-to-end testing suite
• Prototyped numerous ideas to evaluate feasibility, including mobile apps with React Native

Spreedly – Durham, NC – October 2017-December 2018

Senior Software Engineer

Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Riak

• Helped with recruitment and onboarding, including interviewing junior through senior engineering candidates, interviewing engineering managers, and providing mentorship to new engineers and summer interns
• Improved developer productivity by automating common developer workflows, decreasing mistakes and improving ticket turn-around times
• Served as a major contributor to the open-source Active Merchant library, including cleaning up issues, landing many outstanding pull requests, improving community interaction, and writing hundreds of my own features and bug fixes

Khan Academy – Remote – June 2015-October 2017

Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, and Senior Developer

React, Python, Node, Google Cloud Services, Bigtable

• Significantly cut down hosting expenses by leading a team of twelve engineers to improve alerting and metrics, begin thinking in terms of user-perceived performance and downtime, and begin rough budgeting per-feature
• Improved information security by leading the creation of a Security Reading Group, which spun off a Red Team security event that identified and fixed roughly a hundred security issues in the Khan Academy website.
• Improved recruitment process by introducing behavioral interviews and take-home projects for engineers, shortening the entire interview cycle, and working with HR to begin monitoring interview efficacy
• Led and helped implement various efforts to improving our site speed, including breaking up a large in-memory structure, improving our multinationalization pipeline, and moving from Backbone to React

Knewton – New York, NY – January 2014-June 2015

Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, and Senior Developer

Scrum, React, Python, Java, Kotlin, Maven, Gradle, Cassandra, AWS, CloudFormation

• Successfully led team to launch three new services for partners in the span of just three months, dramatically cutting down partner integration time and partner integration cost
• Took Graph Tools team from eight weeks behind schedule to eight weeks ahead in the span of only a few months; took team from being a roadblock to being a template for how to improve interactions between partners, product, and engineering
• Led design and deployment of some of Knewton’s earliest partner-facing web tools, including introducing new technologies to Knewton such as DynamoDB, Kotlin, and Flask
• Wrote self-contained Vagrant-backed proof-of-concept for moving all Knewton services to Mesos

Fog Creek Software – New York, NY – May 2005-January 2014

Engineering Manager, Product Lead, and Senior Developer

C#, .NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Redis, Python, C, C++, Objective-C, Cocoa, Win32, PowerShell, IIS, Elasticsearch

• Prototyped and led the development of Kiln, a distributed version control system featuring a Git/Mercurial translation engine and one of the earliest Elasticsearch-based code search systems
• Played a key role in engineering recruitment, conducting hundreds of interviews and speaking at recruitment events
• Authored the build and deployment systems for the Copilot and Kiln products, and heavily improved the system for FogBugz
• Maintained the cross-platform (Windows/Mac) Copilot desktop applications, server architecture, and website

Education

Duke University – B.S. in Computer Science. Graduated magna cum laude.

Open Source & Community

• Speaking and Writing: Author of bitquabit, which routinely draws thousands of readers and has been syndicated by mainstream publications. Speaker at conferences and meetups, including StackOverflow Dev Days, NYC Python, and more
• Open Source: Core contributor to Factor, an open-source, dynamically typed programming language, and contributor to Mercurial, a distributed version control system similar to Git
• Mentorship: Mentor for computer science students at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill; advised on CS curriculum for Bayside High School (Queens, NY); guided students in the University of Toronto’s UCOSP program