Ben Hirsch Email & Phone Number

United States

San Francisco, California, Us

Principal engineer for Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS) and Twitch. Primarily I work on the low latency HLS product and branch into the Real Time WebRTC product as necessary.Some highlights from what I've worked on:* Lead for 20+ engineer projects moving services from on-prem to AWS, leading the projects from prototype through experiments, production design & iteration, and ultimately migration * Built the transcoding capacity aggregation systems that enable global broadcast ingestion to where there is transcoding capacity and availability* Boring (or exciting depending on your perspective) projects like build systems for Go & Rust interop, writing tests to raise the quality of developer experience on projects, and generally making things easier for the 40+ engineer organization I help lead

San Francisco, California, Us

Designing large scale distributed systems to deliver video to Twitch's hundreds of thousands of concurrent broadcasters and millions of viewers worldwide.

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

Lead cloud media services design and development for Amazon Cloud Cam. Developed cloud services for managing WebRTC SFU processes & computer vision pipelines, worked on GStreamer media pipelines for computer-vision driven clip creation, scaled the system from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of concurrent cameras.Worked with senior engineers from Ring and Blink to integrate their backends into the Amazon ecosystem. Worked on features for Ring Beams.Worked on various prototype camera systems.

Acquired by Amazon Lab126.Optimized texture mapping (bilinear interpolation to dewarp fisheye camera images) in C and assembly for a high performance, low powered embedded SoC (Movidius).Worked to understand the architecture of the SoC and designed strategies to organize data structures according to the capabilities of the chip to drastically reduce computations necessary for panorama stitching to run in real time at high frame rates (30-60fps).Contributed to the ISP development with my knowledge of the SoC.Implemented the libx264 and Live555 libraries in our software to encode and stream panoramic video over the network in real time.Developed an API for US Army servers running our software to discover and choose mobile camera units (over UDP) and to view and control panoramic video sources (over TCP).Set up the EC2 web server. Wrote the HTML/CSS following a PDF of the design. Wrote Javascript to make the website front-end dynamic, worked with outsourced developers' PHP code to implement features when it was required. Wrote a few independent projects in Go for one-off monitoring or testing scripts and just to learn Go.

San Luis Obispo, Ca, Us

Attempted to parallelize GenSel, software that analyzes data to predict which genes affect specific phenotypes. Algorithms involved Markov Chains using Monte Carlo methods (Gibbs sampling). Software originally used the Eigen C++ library.Parallelized the matrix and vector math involved using CUDA to interface with Eigen; main algorithms involved were SAXPY (S = Ax + Y) and reductions. Created and ran numerous benchmarks to discover the size of data necessary for CUDA to outperform Eigen as well as the best approaches for keeping the GPU fully occupied with data by exploring different thread counts per block size as well as increasing instruction level parallelism by interleaving memory loads and computation.

Atascadero, California, Us

Designed web components using a Java DSL (Domain Specific Language) to represent HTML and Javascript as Java Objects. Java was also used for the server, back-end logic, and in a custom Model-View framework to organize the code.I often worked with Javascript, jQuery, and asynchronous logic in designing components for the web site, and also worked with PostgreSQL.

St. Paul, Minnesota, Us

Designed a program that collated statistics from test results/timing benchmarks which were in various formats (HTML, CSV, XML) and exported the results to generated static HTML pages. That way results could be stored on internal shared file systems instead of spinning up servers to query results.Worked with Java code base to fix bugs.Designed tests with C#Debugged and automated tests with ANT

My main project was developing a system where Residential Advisors (RAs) could check out equipment and be automatically notified when their equipment was due back.