Benjamin Pollack Email & Phone Number

Chapel Hill, Nc, Us

Chevy Chase, Md, Us

North Vancouver, British Columbia, Ca

I worked on heavily improving our team's efficiency, more than doubling our velocity. I did that by removing meetings, improving the focus of the ones we kept, improving communication between engineers and product, and, most importantly, tracking where we were losing time sprint-to-sprint and systematically attacking those issues. I also worked to improve our hiring pipeline, develop a brand-new leveling system for engineers, and develop sustainable ways to pay down our tech debt.

Milford, New Jersey, Us

I worked on basically every part of the app, from the build system to the assignment editor to the content management system to content discovery, to hardcopy printing. I improved performance throughout the app, introduced Elasticsearch to browse our assignments, brought in technologies to improve developer performance (e.g. ImmerJS, React Hooks, Apollo Client, Cypress, and Bugsnag), and helped maintain and scale our infrastructure and deployment.

Durham, Nc, Us

My first Rails shop, I improved developer productivity by automating common developer workflows, decreasing mistakes and improving ticket turn-around times and 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. I also helped with recruiting and new employee mentoring.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Initially a developer, I Improved site speed and accessibility by porting numerous pages from Backbone/Handlebars to React, made proofs-of-concept on infrastructure improvements (including examining Kubernetes, moving data processing to Google Container Engine, and experimenting with PyPy and Kotlin), and rewrote the deployment and alerting system to avoid bottlenecks on deploys.As a manager, I focused on improving our team efficiency and security, and on improving our recruiting and inteview process. On the former, I Improved information security by leading the creation of a Security Reading Group, which spun off a Red Team security event; I led development scaling our content system to better handle multinationalization and internationalization; and I began work to track our technology expenditures to get a better handle on our costs. To the latter, I introducing behavioral interviews and take-home projects for engineers to our interview process, and worked with People Ops to begin tracking the efficacy of our interview steps.

Hoboken, New Jersey, Us

As a developer, I focused mostly on our deployment and execution environment. In this effort, brought Knewton's Python development in line with best-practices, and introducing code quality tooling, that was used throughout the org. I also improved deployment speed and reliability across the engineering org by designing and launching dashboards that monitored deployment time and success rates for various components, and made a proof-of-concept for moving all Knewton services to MesosAs a manager, I took a struggling team and made it successful: we went from months behind to months ahead of schedule, which in turn gave us the breathing to deliver some massive automation improvements that dramatically cutting down partner integration time and partner integration cost. This effort represented the first time Knewton had partner-facing web apps to better facilitate self-service. The project was so successful that our team structure and process was copied in other parts of the organization.

New York, Ny, Us

Founder, developer, and team lead of Kiln.

Durham, North Carolina, Us

Graded assignments, wrote foundation code for assignments, and tutored students.

Wrote code for various internal applications, including companywide news broadcasts; automated distribution of new ad templates using Ruby and GraphicsMagick.