Ben Lavender Email & Phone Number

New Orleans, La, Us

South San Francisco, California, Us

* Acted as landing team engineer for spinning up a new internal tools team in Stripe's Dublin office.* A top technical interviewer at Stripe in 2019 by total interviews conducted.* Designed and led implementation of a new system for managing capacity of several thousand CI nodes, resulting in significant availability improvements with reduced cost.* Created SLAs for the test infrastructure team. Selected the goals, defined metrics, designed a process for monitoring them and for dealing with them when they aren't met.* Created tools for tracing highly parallelized CI builds, resulting in performance improvements of approximately 15% across a 45-node build process.* Created tools for profiling local test loops, resulting in a 50% improvement in wall-clock time for local tests.* Created tools for instant detection and mitigation of flaky tests across a very large code base (over 250k tests).* Spearheaded a large-scale migration removing access to customer data for development purposes, working with dozens of teams to manage replacement flows and systems.* As part of a team, responsible for management and operation of remote development servers. As part of this team, was primarily responsible for projects such as graviton support, optimizing cloud costs in a complex environment of savings plans, migration to new service mesh and service discovery systems, moving from simplistic background jobs to temporal, migration to internal container-based deployments, and more.* Designed and implemented Stripe's first system for defining code ownership, including building an RPC system with access to source control that's now a part of many development flows.As part of internal rotations, also worked on projects such as latency of administrative tools and a large-scale migration of data jobs to localized data storage for regulatory requirements.Worked remotely in Boulder, 2017-2019, in-office in Dublin, Ireland, 2019-late 2020, and remotely from New Orleans thereafter.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

* Created easy tools for creating chatops, providing an internally popular interface for creating operational management. These tools have been adopted by dozens of services internally. * Managed the 5-strong developer experience team, responsible for tools for CI, CD, chatops, local development, and error tracking. * Primary maintainer of internal deployment system. This system deploys github.com 100 times a day with low risk and high visibility. * Primary maintainer of internal CI systems. GitHub builds run over 40 hours of tests in 5-7 minutes on every push. A flaky test identification, mitigation, tracking and resolution workflow is built in. * Implemented changes to the github.com status API to allow multiple CI builds per commit. * Added abuse rate limits to github.com. These limits have prevented spammers and malfunctioning integrations from causing innumerable availability incidents. * Participated in primary github.com on-call rotation, and handled several availability incidents. * Created tools to manage on-call rotations and alert routing. This pull-request system for alert ownership has been very successful and adopted company-wide. * Created tools for managing environment variables, bringing service configuration out of puppet.

New Orleans, La, Us

First technical hire at Liveset, a site focusing on streaming concerts. Did all development, working off a decent base product done by a consulting agency.

* Raised a seed round to start a graph database-as-a-service with some colleagues. * Handled all operational and business issues while implementing the web front-end to the database.

* Primary on-call and operations for intranet portals provided to dozens of remote organizations worldwide. * Migrated a 40-server installation to Puppet for management. * Managed the release process in subversion for a team of 15 developers, using a staging -> QA -> trunk workflow. This workflow change reduced almost-daily outages to almost never over 6 months. * Migrated dozens of services to Xen VMs.

Lots of freelance work in a variety of languages, including: * Built an IP address management system for a CLEC. * Built an auto-scaling AWS infrastructure for a huge music festival in Germany. * Built a coast guard inspection certificate management system for a shipping company doing billions in revenue for interior waterways in Louisiana.

* Promoted from Monitoring Technician to Network Engineer to Developer over 5 years. * Wrote management tools for the company’s primary customer mail server, including onboarding/offboarding, and cluster-wide log search. * Wrote a system to generate copy-pasteable customer router configurations for installation technicians.