Ben Carlsson

Seattle, WA

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[email protected] / github.com/glacials / linkedin.com/in/ben / (925) 979-5797

Early Twitch engineer with 10+ years experience in backend & full-stack engineering and technical leadership, specializing in developer velocity.

Job History

Principal Software Engineer
@

SunPower

Seattle, WA
July 2022–Present
  • Led design and development of a unified workflow orchestration team and service by seeking out and talking to internal engineers and customers, freeing engineers across three teams from working on similar solutions
  • Championed a blameless incident postmortem culture by mentoring managers and engineers, and coordinating & collaborating with principal engineers to create a template and review pipeline, leading the company from performing ~1 to performing ~10 postmortems per month
Staff Software Engineer
@

FalconX

Seattle, WA
January 2022–June 2022
  • Entered via acquisition of YourBase January 2022
  • Improved internal developer experience and onboarding by building internal CLI to manage monolith complexity, reducing time-to-first-commit for new engineers from 3 weeks to 2 days
Staff Software Engineer
@

YourBase

Seattle, WA
April 2020–January 2022
  • Ideated & led a company pivot from proprietary CI product to an installable library which gave an ~80% benefit for ~1% onboarding effort, directly leading to signing large B2B customers including Yelp, PayPal, Gusto, and Instacart
  • Further scaled test selection libraries for Python and Ruby using a packaged Go binary as a performant backend, bringing customer test times from 1+ hour to ~10 minutes
  • Independently discovered and optimized slow database queries within 2 weeks of joining by replacing raw queries with ORM relationships, bringing the most-used API endpoint from >12s down to <50ms
  • Exited via acquisition by FalconX January 2022
Technical Founder
@

Splits.io

Seattle, WA
January 2019–April 2020
  • Improved and hardened infrastructure by moving from raw EC2 instances to autoscaled, fault-tolerant, and load-balanced containers, reducing incidents from ~2/week to ~1/6mo and reducing ongoing infrastructure needs ever since to ~nothing
  • Improved business strategy and finances by performing user interviews and creating premium product tier, bringing revenue from ~$30/mo to ~$500/mo
  • Wore many hats by engaging in customer support, events, and product-based marketing, improving monthly active users from ~10k to ~15k in one year
  • Recruited and led a team of three by hiring from existing open source contributors and community members, ~doubling engineering velocity and creating our first sales and ops roles, leading to partnerships with external organizations like Games Done Quick
Senior Software Engineer
@

Twitch

San Francisco, CA
2014–2019
  • Built, scaled, and ran panels on foundational products like Twitch Chat, improving user trust and community building
  • Rearchitected authentication and authorization in follow-up response to security P1 by advocating for, founding, and building the Identity team, removing credential-related information from all future known security incidents
  • Built the platform's first spam filter using a naive Bayes classifier, reducing on-site bots, scams, and abuse
  • Merged disparate social graphs with an acquired company by building a transitionary interoperability service, quickly enabling a seamless, interleaved user experience far ahead of merged databases
  • Led to $1B acquisition by Amazon
Software Engineering Intern
@

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Livermore, CA
2010–2013 (summers)

Skills

Technical Skills

Education

Follow Up

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