Ben Lobaugh is a seasoned Director of Engineering based in Seattle with 14 years of hands-on experience and over 20 years in technology, known for building high-performing teams and scalable client solutions. He leads with a practical blend of architecture, process, and people development—establishing SDLC best practices, clarifying roles, and launching mentorship and recognition programs that materially improved delivery and engagement. Technically fluent across Node.js, React, PHP, SQL, AWS/GCP, microservices, and TDD, he also contributes to prominent open-source projects like Automattic’s Jetpack, improving multisite functionality and UX for millions of WordPress sites. Ben has a track record of transforming flat organizations into scalable, team-based operations and standardizing hiring and onboarding to raise candidate quality. He pairs strategic leadership consulting through Lobaugh Leadership with daily engineering stewardship at Mindsize, often surfacing emerging technologies to create new client opportunities. An unusual strength is his aptitude for both deep technical refactoring and people-centric programs, enabling sustainable growth on both codebases and teams.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Associate of Science Computer Science/Music Theory, Associate of Science Computer Science/Music Theory at Centralia Community College
W. F. West
Bachelor of Computer Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Computer Science Computer Science at Northwest Nazarene University
Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:251 commits, 3 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the Jetpack plugin, focusing on both backend and frontend aspects. Their work included bug fixes and feature implementations related to multisite functionality, Twitter timeline widgets, and YouTube shortcodes. They also addressed code conflicts by merging branches, refactored code, and updated the user interface to improve the user experience.
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