Benjamin Pollack

I’m a generalist tech worker with extensive experience at small- to medium-sized startups. And by generalist, I truly mean generalist: I’ve managed managers, and I’ve written assembly language for desktop apps. I’ve worked heavily on React SPAs, and I’ve comfortably debugged performance issues with networked storage. I’ve sorted out problems in build systems, and I’ve taken over a team that was months behind schedule and turned it into a template copied through the organization. Whether I’m needed as a developer, tech evangelist, recruiter, coach, or manager, I’m well-suited to helping wherever a startup needs me.

Experience

Dooly – Remote – October 2021-Present

Senior Engineering Manager

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

• Systematically shortened the team’s cycle time by streamlining ceremony and meetings, encouraging tighter integration between product/design and engineers, improving knowledge sharing and mentorship within the team, and helping engineers implement their own ideas of how to remove bottlenecks
• Provided the specification for a new Platform team, including proposed staffing, KPIs, initial projects, workflow, and relationship to the rest of the engineering org, and then shepherded it to a successful launch
• Helped design and lead a virtual engineering offsite/hack week, during which engineers from across the org were able to implement a number of quality-of-life improvements, and also test out and agree upon workflow improvements
• Improved the interview format for engineers, replacing low-signal steps with high-signal ones, and developed interview formats for Principal engineers and backend engineers
• Performed numerous interviews for engineering, product management, and design, and trained and integrated interested engineers into the process
• Mentored an IC who wanted to experiment with management as they stepped into and out of the role, with numerous checkpoints and support, and a clean exit that left them ready to step up into a Principal engineering role
• 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

• Wrote and improved numerous aspects of the product on both front- and backend, including content management, content discovery, assignment editing, online assignment submission, and hardcopy assignment printing
• 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
• Cut down on non-actionable developer pages and cut down issue resolution time by introducing better alerting and triage tools, such as Bugsnag, and better end-to-end testing tools, including Cypress
• Prototyped numerous ideas to evaluate feasibility, including mobile apps with React Native
• Maintained and managed infrastructure throughout the app, including fixing bugs, keeping dependencies and third-party tooling up-to-date in all parts of the app, and improving and resolving issues with the continuous integration pipeline

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

• 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
• 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.
• Led development breaking our monolithic, single tree of possible lessons into multiple trees with crosslinks to better support multinationalization and internationalization
• Improved site speed and accessibility by porting numerous pages from Backbone/Handlebars to React, and adding custom mobile stylesheets and behaviors
• Led prototypes and proofs-of-concept on infrastructure improvements, including examining Kubernetes, moving data processing to Google Container Engine, and experimenting with PyPy and Kotlin
• Improved developer productivity and issue response by rewriting the deployment system and dramatically improving error messages and alerting

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 seven-developer 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
• Brought Python development in line with best-practices by introducing up-to-date tooling, writing best-practice guides and style guides, and introducing code quality tooling, that was used throughout the org
• Improved deployment speed and reliability across the engineering org by designing and launching dashboards that monitored deployment time and success rates for various components
• 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 then led development of, the Kiln distributed source control system, including contributing to Mac and Windows client installers, writing a seamless Git/Mercurial translation engine to allow engineers to use either tool with any repository, implementing a source code search engine atop Elasticsearch, and leading contributions back to the Mercurial open-source DVCS project
• Assisted heavily with recruiting and hiring, including speaking at recruitment events, conducting hundreds of interviews, conducting thousands of resume reviews, designing interview questions, and helping with improvements to the overall interviewing process
• Helped train and mentor new employees at all levels, including nearly a dozen summer and winter interns
• Gave training talks in dozens of cities to help evangelize and market various Fog Creek products, including Kiln, FogBugz, and Copilot
• Wrote numerous blog posts and published articles to help market the Fog Creek company brand and its products
• Authored many tools to help automate developer flows and decrease errors, including writing both the Copilot and Kiln build and deployment systems, and writing a custom in-house continuous integration system based around feature branches when no off-the-shelf solution existed
• Wrote and maintained the Copilot desktop applications on Windows and Macintosh, and also wrote and maintained numerous Copilot backend components

Education

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

Extras

• I have contributed to Factor, an open-source, dynamically typed programming language, and Mercurial, a distributed version control system similar to Git
• My blog, bitquabit, routinely draws tens of thousands of readers, and has had its content syndicated by other publications
• I have spoken at several conferences and meet-ups, including StackOverflow DevDays, NYC Python, OUTC, and Columbia University’s Application Development Initiative
• I have worked extensively in education, including serving as mentors to students in the computer science programs at both UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University, consulting with Bayside High School (Queens, NY) on their computer science curriculum, and mentoring students making numerous contributions to the Mercurial DVCS as part of the University of Toronto UCOSP program