Ben Sima's Resume
Staff Software Engineer Specializing in Scalable Infrastructure, Distributed Systems, and DevOps

I'm currently looking for a role and team where I can make an end-to-end impact. Ideally it allows for driving solutions to business problems from start to finish, across potentially disparate domains and teams. I expect to be writing high-level strategy as well as low-level technical implementations. I enjoy shipping something every week, or better yet every day! Email: ben@bsima.me

Testimonials

Ben works proactively and independently, given even a vague problem description (e.g. "more visibility") he'll come up with something useful.

finds problems where his individual contributions have a very high power-to-weight ratio & implements direct solutions that solve these problems in a timely & efficient manner. has a tendency to cut to the heart of an issue and attack it directly, rather than get stuck in a quagmire of indecision or coordination for issues where the long-term goals are unstable or subject to change.

Establishes what the MVP is and builds it. Avoids bureaucratic overhead.

Ben is open to share his knowledge and help others. He has helped me a couple of times and showed a lot of patience, empathy, and knowledge.

Employment History

Groq.com, Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure, 2019/6 - 2024/10

Groq is a hardware company that makes fast chips for advanced ML workflows. I implemented a few operations in the high-level ML library groqapi, developed internal and external facing documentation systems, managed internal services, build tooling, and DevOps, developed hardware-in-the-loop testing, developed CI/CD and packaging to reliably deliver our product to high-stakes customers, and optimized developer workflows, removing bottlenecks that blocked shipping and improving cycle time by 25%.

Technologies: Nix, Haskell, Python, bash, Docker, many others.

UE Authority, Senior Software Engineer, 2018 - 2019

UE.co provided car- and home-insurance sales leads to a country-wide network of salespeople. I developed data pipelines for use in their next-gen platform. The service fetched leads from external providers or CSV upload of lead data, scrubbed the data through half-a-dozen internal services, and delivered the end result to a front-end application. Services were written in Haskell and designed to be highly concurrent, handling 60k-70k leads per minute.

Technologies: AWS, Haskell data pipeline backend, MySQL and AWS Redshift, RESTful API with Swagger docs

Software Engineer, Liaison Technologies, 2015 - 2018

I co-designed and implemented a distributed, streaming, immutable, event-sourced cloud database for semi-structured enterprise data, plus a few AI-based microservices for extracting structured intel out of the semi-structured streams of data in our database. The business goal is to flexibly extract intelligible data from customers' data banks. Everything was done in Clojure, on a private cloud infrastructure with Docker containers as deployable microservices.

Technologies: Clojure and Java, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, ArangoDB, Apache Kafka, Apache HBase, REST API with Swagger integration, event sourcing, command query responsibility segregation (CQRS), schema matching

Older roles

  • Thermo Fisher, 2017: Developed a system for creating and running remote hardware tests on one of their equipment lines. Field technicians could collaborate on custom diagnostic tests for each instrument, connect to any instrument on the network, run tests remotely or on-site, etc. Technologies: Typescript & AngularJS UI, Python backend, CouchDB datastore
  • WholeLatteLove.com, 2015: Full stack engineering on their custom ecommerce platform in Ruby on Rails. Designed & implemented app-wide notification system, implemented CI/CD, performed code upgrade and migrations, developed a comprehensive test suite.
  • Thinkful, 2014 - 2015: Instructor in data science and full-stack web development with Python for new and intermediate students. Contributed to written curricula.
  • Freelance developer, 2012 - 2014: Created two ecommerce systems in PHP, a ClojureScript front-end, and e-magazine site for a local Rochester NY publication.

Presentations

  • A Categorical Theory of Patches. May 3, 2018, Papers We Love San Diego
  • Getting Started with Yesod. April 10, 2018, Haskell Hangout
  • Intro to Easy Deployments with NixOps. March 21, 2018, San Diego DevOps Group

Education

A.B., Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2014. Thesis: Wonder and Desire in Romantic Love: Levinas and Irigaray