Ben Mckown
Staff Software Engineer at Checkr, Inc.
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Mckown is a Staff Software Engineer based in Austin, Texas with 11 years of experience building reliable infrastructure and backend systems across startups and large platforms. He excels at solving hard engineering puzzles—moving between SRE, backend, and data-science roles to reduce cost, increase reliability, and ship robust features. His career includes leadership and hands-on roles at Checkr, Truework, Facebook, Optimizely, and Khoros, where he led zero-downtime Kubernetes upgrades, Kafka migrations, and high-throughput ingestion pipelines. Ben is an active contributor to graph-processing tooling, improving centrality algorithms and PageRank robustness in the JVM Cassovary library, reflecting a strong algorithmic and performance focus. With a master's in physical chemistry and early research experience in computational reaction dynamics, he brings a rigorous, analytical approach to systems design and debugging. He’s the kind of engineer who seeks the hardest problems and enjoys taking them head-on while mentoring teams through complex technical transitions.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Chemistry, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Chemistry at The University of Texas at AustinMaster of Science (M.S.) Physical Chemistry, Master of Science (M.S.) Physical Chemistry at University of Chicago
French
Stackoverflow
191reputation
26kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (12)
graph-algorithms10
scala10
benchmarking9
jvm7
virtual-machine7
apache-spark6
html6
exceptions6
sbt6
csv6
ngram6
python6
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
twitter/cassovary
Feb 2015 - Jun 2015
Cassovary is a simple big graph processing library for the JVM
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 14 PRs, 67 comments in 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the `cassovary` library by adding and refining centrality algorithms. They implemented the closeness centrality algorithm and added performance benchmarks for existing centrality measures. The commits also include modifications to handle dangling nodes in the PageRank algorithm, demonstrating a focus on improving the robustness and functionality of the graph processing library. Furthermore, the user updated test graphs and made improvements to existing classes like `AbstractCentrality`, `DegreeCentrality`, and `Hits`.
graph-processingjvmprocessing-librarygraphjava
bmckown/cassovary
Jan 2015 - Jun 2015
Contributions:56 pushes, 24 branches in 4 months
graph-processingjvmprocessing-librarygraphjava
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