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Benjamin Sales

SRE/Backend Engineer
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Squamish, BC, Canada
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bensales.me
Highly experienced, adaptable and motivated software engineer with over 15 years professional experience and a deep love for technology. Accomplished at building and maintaining high performance platforms from both an infrastructure and software perspective. Strong emphasis on well designed, reliable, maintainable systems. A solid team player with experience at building, leading and mentoring teams. Has a passion for trying to solving hard problems with simple solutions.

Work Experience

FATMAP

Lead SRE Engineer
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Mar 2016 - Nov 2020
  • Built a map platform with Kubernetes that would serve 50+ million daily tile requests.
  • Managed AWS infrastructure landscape, including security & cost control.
  • Built infrastructure for identifying and alerting on issues and bottlenecks in the system.
  • Architected and built various key services such as the live data service that collects, collates & presents ski lift and piste status for resorts across the globe.
  • Helped build a devops culture with technology, process and mentoring.

FATMAP

Interim CTO
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Jul 2018 - Apr 2019
  • Managed 15 across 3 teams engineers in Berlin, Lithuania and remote.
  • Worked closely with the CEO, COO and Head of Product to align engineering resources with company goals.
  • Hired several key engineers in the product team.
  • Improved engineering practices.
  • Bi-weekly 1-to-1s with all engineers.

So.Energy

Software Engineer (Contract)
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Nov 2015 - Feb 2016

Worked on a 3 month project for the completion and maintenance of the So.Energy customer facing application post-launch. The project consisted of a Rails back end that integrated with multiple 3rd party API's, with a Backbone front end. On completion of the contract the application was fully featured and reliable.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe

Backend Software Engineer (Contract)
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Jul 2014 - Mar 2015

Worked on the back end server for the Little Big Planet Franchise working on the Ruby/C++ application that includes a custom in-memory Key/Value DB and high performance scoreboard functionality. This was my second contract at SCEE and my work consisted of modifying the existing code base to support an upcoming version of the game title, Little Big Planet 3. This role presented many unique (yet fun) challenges due to the interesting nature of the application and the challenges of a high volume, highly available app.

Cahootsy (now defunct)

Software Engineer (Contract)
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Nov 2013 - Jun 2014

Sole developer tasked to take the product from conception to MVP. This was a challenging project with tight deadlines, however the launch was a success and continued development was handed over to an offshore team. In October 2015 I worked with Cahootsy again to provide assistance to the offshore development team with improvements to the internal search engine based upon SOLR.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Software Engineer (Contract)
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Mar 2012 - Sep 2013

Implementing a restful API that connected data from an online game server to a customer facing website. This was a long project with many complexities due to the custom nature of the backend framework and the high volume of traffic that both the game server and API receive.

Reevoo

Software Engineer
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Feb 2007 - Jun 2010
  • Built out the first versions of the B2C and B2B offerings
  • Contributed to Ruby on Rails core
  • Built price scraping services for multiple retail sites

EurotaxGlass (Now Autovista)

Junior Software Developer
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Feb 2003 - Feb 2006

Worked on maintaining the legacy C++ Windows applications and a following rewrite to modern .NET applications.

Projects

Kubernetes Explained series

Author
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Mar 2019 - Current

A lockdown project that attempts to explain how Kubernetes works at a technical level by writing simplistic versions of the various Kubernetes components e.g. etcd and running these in local or cloud-based virtual machines.

Skills

  • Kubernetes
  • Kubernetes Operators
  • AWS
  • Golang
  • Ruby
  • Technical documentation
  • Software Architecture
  • Building and running engineering teams
  • Engineering team process
  • Agile process