Benjamin Carlsson
Staff-level Backend Software Engineer
[email protected], @glcls, github.com/glacials, linkedin.com/in/ben
Job history
YourBase
Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead
Remote (Seattle, WA)
April 2020–Present
April 2020–Present
- Proposed and led company-wide pivot from unsuccessful CI-based test selection product to successful lightweight Python and Ruby libraries, which landed enterprise customers like Yelp and Venmo
- Used packaged Go binary as a performant backend to trace and understand code paths to skip tests that don't need to run, bringing customer test times from 1+ hours to ~10 minutes, reducing carbon footprint and speeding up engineers
- Built and scaled team by 3x in a year, leading senior level engineers
- Optimized the company's most expensive API endpoint from 12s+ to <50ms within four weeks of joining
- Python, Go, Ruby, Docker
Splits.io
Founder & CEO
Remote (Seattle, WA)
December 2018–April 2020
December 2018–April 2020
- Improved a costly, unstable side project to a profitable, stable one one.
- Led a team of three in engineering, product, design, and marketing
- Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Vue, WebSockets, Docker
- Today, serves 15k+ monthly active users with zero maintenance effort
Twitch
Senior Software Engineer
San Francisco → Remote (Seattle, WA)
2014–2019
2014–2019
- Built and scaled foundational products like Chat to 46B message deliveries / day
- Migrated monolothic web app to microservices
- Founded and bootstrapped internal authn/authz team
- Designed and taught new-hire Go class
- Mentored several engineers and interns
- Ran panels; helped creators and fans interact in socially healthy ways
- Ruby on Rails, Go, JavaScript, Terraform
- Led to $1B acquisition by Amazon
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Software Engineering Intern
Livermore, CA
2010–2013 (summers)
2010–2013 (summers)
- Built open source tools for the climate science community
Projects
-
Licenseland (2019–present)
- Dead simple dual-licensing for open source projects
- Vue, Firebase, Stripe Connect
-
What's in Standard?
(2013–present)
- A reference tool for Magic: The Gathering players
- Twitter bot, mobile app, and web app all powered by one API
- Firebase, Flutter, and Vue respectively
-
Housebot
(2014–2015)
- A Twitch bot that lets chat participants vote to control my lights
- Node.js, Z-Wave API, Phillips Hue API
- In retrospect I wouldn't recommend letting the internet control pieces of your house :)
Skills
- Soft: Community management, technical writing, open source
- Code: Go, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Vue
- Tools: Docker, PostgreSQL, Terraform, Firebase, AWS
Education
- B.Sc. in Computer science
- California State University, Chico (2010–2013)
- President of CSLUG, the Chico State Linux User Group
- Member of the computer science honors society UPE