Ben Carlsson

Seattle, WA

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

Early Twitch engineer with 10+ years experience in full stack & backend engineering and tech leadership,
with an eye for developer velocity and user experience.

Job History

iOS Engineer
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Brown Note

Self-Employed
Seattle, WA
January 2024–Present
  • A side project that got out of hand and became a full-time job, Brown Note is an iOS and iPadOS app that codifies a pen-and-paper technique I developed to help diagnose gastrointenstinal issues
  • Talked to users and rapidly prototyped new ideas, leading to users ultimately discovering problem foods
  • Self-taught Swift, SwiftUI, and SwiftData using modern iOS standards and practices, leading to first-try App Store approval
  • Wore many hats serving roles from engineer to designer to customer support
Principal Software Engineer
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SunPower

Seattle, WA
July 2022–January 2024
  • Founded, designed, & built a new solar workflow orchestration team and system, resolving coordination issues between five "boots on the ground" teams operating across hundreds of jurisdictions with minutely different laws
  • Mentored senior engineers to bring organization up to modern software standards including blameless portmortems, on-call flows, and design document review
Staff Software Engineer
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YourBase

Seattle, WA
April 2020–June 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
CEO & Technical Founder
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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
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Twitch

San Francisco, CA
January 2014–January 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
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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Livermore, CA
2010–2013 (summers)

Skills

Technical Skills

Education

Follow Up

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