Benjamin Ortega Email & Phone Number

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

We curate the tech organization’s developer CI/CD processes into a cohesive experience, and also build and scale CI and feature flagging systems to support enterprise needs. We're also collaborating across multiple business units to plan and develop an enterprise-wide developer portal based on Backstage.io that puts developers at the center of our ongoing technical transformation.I spend time connecting stakeholders and plaform offerings to transform and productive our developer tooling and experience while also staying hands-on in mentoring engineers and managers to get them delivering with confidence.

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

Leading teams that own systems and APIs for customer and engagement data through technical transformations to enable new cool stuff.

New York, Ny, Us

Led distributed engineering teams responsible for web and mobile applications and underlying infrastructure for Kickserv, a Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK SaaS product for the field service management sector. Introduced agility practices that doubled velocity while focusing our efforts on shipping new functionality that directly supported business goalsScoped and architected product features as well as under-the-hood improvements with an eye towards empowering our team to develop and deliver a SaaS product that we were proud to put our names on.Prioritized and scheduled technical debt with an eye towards improving observability and maintainability. Improved legacy codebase to the point where the team decided to cancel planned rewrites of several large areas of code. Reduced error rates to 50% of their original totals within one year, even after adding many new sources of error reporting.Executed ~30% cost savings by simplifying/reserving/optimizing AWS infrastructure as needed.(My team did quite a lot to make this all happen -- while I wrote plenty of Ruby code, I also made sure we put our heads together to make sure were heading in the right direction, or least a less-wrong one.

Mountain View, California, Us

Designed and built developer-friendly CI/CD products and practices to facilitate developing for, deploying to, and scaling up the Samsung SmartThings IoT platform. Scoped, planned, and moved forward company-wide initiatives including service inventory and new environment deployments.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Us

Developed, instrumented, and optimized a multi-platform social e-commerce system connecting parents to share, buy, and sell kids' clothing and accessories.Tech: Ruby, Rails, AWS, Docker, CircleCI, PostgreSQL, Redis, REST, hypermedia APIs, Android, iOS

Denver, Co, Us

Built on the success of the GovDelivery SaaS platform and ensuing organizational growth, scaling up to work for tens of thousands of regular application users and over 100 million subscribers.• Served as a tech lead, coding, mentoring, and learning from product, cloud, and platform engineers as a member of a scrum team. Curated and refined values and agile processes such that they continued to serve us well as a growing team with myriad product offerings in a rapidly-evolving market.• Served as technical product owner, defining requirements and acceptance criteria for technically-oriented products and infrastructure (APIs for mission-critical messaging and analytics, IaaS for continuous delivery, a productized integration platform to connect client systems to ours, et al.).• Researched new technologies and evaluate their suitability for our platform, with an eye towards scaling up for the next 100 million users. (GovDelivery became Granicus after an acquisition and merger in October 2016)

Saint Paul, Mn, Us

Planned and developed a next-generation SaaS platform used by 400+ government clients at the federal, state, and municipal levels to engage with the public as part of an eight-person development team.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Us

Worked as a lead developer with designers and project principals to implement the American Time Use Survey data access system (http://www.atusdata.org), used by researchers and reference specialists to query complex time use data. • Met with researchers and designers to define requirements and develop and test low-fidelity prototypes. • Implemented a Web application for targeted ATUS data queries.• Devised and conducted (with research customer) usability tests using human subjects and made recommendations based on resulting data. • Worked with developers to implement tools and processes for reformatting, cleaning and integrating hierarchical data using a custom Ruby-based data conversation library. Devised and implemented a domain-specific language for researchers with little programming knowledge to make reproducible edits to data during reformatting.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Us

Developed the National Historical Geographic Information System (http://nhgis.org) witha team of two developers along with geographers, demographers, and data archivists. · Replaced legacy Java and PHP infrastructure with a new unit-tested system using Java 5, Struts, JSP, JSF, Hibernate, Spring, jUnit, and SVG · Worked with archivists to implement NHGIS program metadata using the industry-standard DDI format while remaining compatible with our existing tools.Developed a system for the Social Science History Association conference to organizean annual conference for its 1100 members using Ruby on Rails, Prototype/Scriptaculous, and MySQL.

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Us

Developed tools and processes to disseminate demographic micro- and aggregate data for research use for a leading institution of demographic research and data analysis. These took the form of both Web applications for querying/retrieving data, desktop clients for data entry and validation, and data transformation tools for cleaning and normalizing of data.Tech: Java Servlets, Struts, JSP, XML, Microsoft Access VBA, MySQL, Access, MS SQL Server.

Developed and maintained Web-based help desk and project management applicationsfor national retail clients using DHTML and Microsoft technologies (ASP 3.0, IIS, VB,COM, SQL Server). Worked with developers, management, and client representativesto isolate and implement software requirements, documentation, and training materials.

Master’S Degree, Computer Science

Bachelor’S Degree, Inter-College Program

Education record