Ben Packer
Technology at United Auto Workers Union
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBen Packer is a technology leader and full‑stack engineer with 11 years of experience building civic and campaign tools that scale, currently leading technology at the United Auto Workers in New York. He co-founded and ran a worker‑owned SaaS company, blending product, ops, and governance responsibilities with hands‑on engineering, and has led high‑impact projects like a predictive dialer used across competitive races and contributions to DemocracyOS and Spoke for large‑scale civic participation. Comfortable across frontend, backend, telephony, and infrastructure, he specializes in integrations that connect voter contact, SMS/email delivery, and authentication flows. Driven by a focus on how software shapes power and social relationships, he pairs pragmatic engineering with mission design to help organizations transition toward more equitable systems. An early Dartmouth CS grad with linguistics training, he brings a mix of research‑minded problem solving and production experience that often surfaces in UI/UX innovations and data workflows.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science with Linguistics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science with Linguistics at Dartmouth CollegeGreenhill School
Github Skills (23)
javascript10
configuration-management10
user-authentication10
authentication10
nodejs10
react10
api-design9
restful-api9
back-end-development9
api-rest9
front-end-development9
twilio9
backend9
rest-api9
mailgun9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
DemocracyOS/democracyos
Mar 2015 - Nov 2015
Democracia en Red is focusing on specific implementations of DemocracyOS. We are working now working with governments and activists all over Latin America. If you are interested in our online participation tools you can check them out on our site.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 9 PRs, 12 comments in 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to both the front-end and back-end of the DemocracyOS project, addressing issues related to user authentication, sign-in/sign-up flows, and configuration. They implemented changes to the configuration settings, including external sign-in/sign-up URLs. Furthermore, the user worked on modifying components for the admin interface related to laws and topics, including date pickers and comment functionality improvements. They also addressed a bug related to parsing JSON data and performed code cleanup.
decision-makingpolitical-proposalsamericafocusingimplementations
StateVoicesNational/Spoke
Dec 2017 - Feb 2018
mass-contact text/SMS distribution tool
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 2 PRs, 14 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to both the frontend and backend of the application. They improved the image extraction regex in the Twilio integration and added a mailgun option to the mail service. Furthermore, they fixed a bug related to contact uploads in Firefox, and added styling adjustments to the contact upload form. Their contributions demonstrate involvement across multiple aspects of the project, including SMS and email functionality and frontend form enhancements.
marketing-toolsreactthinkytwiliorethinkdb
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