Ben Cherry
Head Of Product at LiveKit
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Cherry is a seasoned product and engineering leader with 16 years of experience building high-performance web and real-time systems from Twitter to LiveKit. Currently Head of Product at LiveKit in San Francisco, he combines hands-on engineering chops with product strategy, previously leading client engineering and developer products. He cut his teeth shipping one of the web’s earliest large-scale single-page apps at Twitter and has a strong track record scaling front-end performance, photo and search features. A prolific open-source contributor, Ben has worked on notable libraries like mustache.js and a JavaScript port of Twitter’s text processing, and recent work shows deep involvement in real-time AI voice/agent integrations. Comfortable moving between code and roadmap, he’s known for refactoring brittle systems into reliable, test-covered platforms. Outside work, his long stint at summer camp hints at a practical, hands-on leadership style grounded in mentorship and team culture.
17 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Engineering, BS Computer Engineering at Santa Clara University
Github Skills (22)
javascript10
realtime10
python10
testing10
text-to-speech10
ruby10
regular-expression10
voice10
agent10
openai10
ai10
rest-api10
templating10
object-oriented-programming9
encoding9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
twitter-archive/twitter-text-js
Sep 2010 - Aug 2011
A JavaScript implementation of Twitter's text processing library
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:69 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben appears to be porting and implementing features for Twitter's text processing library in JavaScript. They are working with regular expressions and modifying the core text processing logic, indicated by code changes in `twitter-text.js`. The commits show a progression of tasks, from initial regex porting to the creation of a conformance test suite, and later, the introduction of HTML encoding. The work suggests involvement in both the core functionality and the overall architecture of the library.
javascripttext-processingtwitter
livekit/agents
Aug 2024 - Jun 2026
A framework for building realtime voice AI agents 🤖🎙️📹
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:100 reviews, 49 PRs, 125 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the development of features related to Cartesia voice control and OpenAI integration within the LiveKit Agents framework. Their work involved modifying existing code and adding new features for text-to-speech (TTS) functionality, including adding support for various voice control parameters and enhancing image handling. They also refactored code and updated dependencies to improve the agent's overall functionality and integration with third-party services. Their contributions demonstrate a focus on improving the agents' capabilities and extending its functionality.
ai-agentaireal-timevoicevideo
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