Ben Church
Engineering Lead at Airbyte
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Church is an engineering leader with 13 years of experience building production-grade systems across Finance, Crypto, AI, and consumer products, currently leading the Marketplace + Builder team at Airbyte. He combines hands-on backend and DevOps craftsmanship (Python, Go, Elixir) with product and operational leadership—driving features like AI Assist, Connector Builder simplification, and User Code Isolation that materially increased Builder adoption. Ben has a track record of reducing CI costs and install friction (80% CI cost cut, static CLI binary), introducing deterministic builds and company-wide taxonomies to reduce on-call load and technical debt. He mentors teams on pragmatic engineering mental models, runs cross-functional processes that move customer problems from support into product and engineering, and publishes metrics through a weekly newsletter for alignment. As an active open-source contributor to Airbyte, he improved connector QA, build pipelines, and reliability tooling that power hundreds of connectors used widely for ETL/ELT. Based in Los Angeles, he also invests in and operates acquired bootstrapped businesses through Calm Capital, blending builder instincts with operator discipline.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Computer Science at University of Victoria
Chinese, English
Github Skills (18)
git10
python10
testing10
cicd10
dockers9
docker9
data-integration8
data-pipeline8
data-pipelines8
javas8
etl8
yaml8
java8
data-engineering8
bash7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
airbytehq/airbyte
Nov 2022 - Jan 2023
The leading data integration platform for ETL / ELT data pipelines from APIs, databases & files to data warehouses, data lakes & data lakehouses. Both self-hosted and Cloud-hosted.
Role in this project:
Backend Engineer & DevOps Engineer
Backend Engineer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1126 reviews, 3 commits, 503 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the development and maintenance of the Airbyte data integration platform. Their work included refactoring job log JSONs to include the Docker version, outputting to versioned folders, handling action calls without connector prefixes, and retrieving and casting connector build statuses. These changes involved modifying Python scripts and testing files within the CI/connector_ops directory, suggesting a focus on improving the build and quality assurance processes.
operationpythondataintegration-platformdata-warehouse
airbytehq/airbyte-platform
Feb 2023 - Mar 2023
The platform that powers Airbyte. Please file issues in https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:10 reviews, 23 commits, 12 PRs in 27 days
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the Airbyte platform by implementing and improving quality assurance checks, specifically integrating them into the testing command. They also added a test to validate the `emitted_at` field in sequential reads. Furthermore, the user worked on refactoring and improving the codebase related to the handling of specifications and remote catalog integration. These contributions span across testing, configuration, and infrastructure.
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