Ben Mckerry
Software Engineer at Sentry
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Mckerry is a software engineer with three years of industry experience, currently building backend systems at Sentry after transitioning from a Site Reliability Engineer role there. He focuses on backend infrastructure and DevOps, with hands-on contributions to the popular open-source Sentry project—improving Celery queue management, Kafka integration, event processing, and backpressure to boost stability and throughput. His background includes performance and API testing at major Canadian banks and a summer internship at BMO, giving him practical experience in reliability and scalable systems in regulated environments. Ben has a Computer Science foundation from Queen's University and early hands-on machine learning and Django app experience from a startup-style team project. He brings a pragmatic SRE mindset to software engineering, favoring observable, resilient designs that prevent incidents before they surface. Colleagues can rely on him for thoughtful infrastructure changes that tangibly improve system performance.
3 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Queen's University
Github Skills (13)
kafka10
celery10
python10
devops9
backend9
monitoring8
rabbitmq8
postgresql8
error-log7
apm7
error-detection7
crash-reports6
django5
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
getsentry/sentry
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:31 reviews, 4 commits, 39 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the back-end infrastructure and configuration of the Sentry platform, focusing on Celery queue management and Kafka integration. Their work involved adding, removing, and modifying Celery queues for various processes, as well as integrating Kafka topics into the server configuration. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the event processing pipeline and backpressure configurations, enhancing the system's performance and stability. They also made code changes to the replay functionality.
performance-monitoringcrash-reportingcrash-reportserror-monitoringmonitoring
getsentry/sentry-kafka-management
Aug 2025 - Mar 2026
Libraries for managing our Kafka clusters/consumers, as well as Taskbroker.
Contributions:27 reviews, 22 PRs, 44 pushes in 7 months
kafka-clustertag-production
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