Ben Pope
Software Engineer at Perpendiculayer Ltd
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Pope is a founder and seasoned software engineer based in London with 12 years of experience building high-performance, correctness-focused distributed systems. He has deep C++ and Go expertise from roles at Redpanda Data, Seastar, and Pusher, where he led backend architecture, SRE efforts, and realtime platform decisions to achieve four nines availability. As a core contributor to Redpanda and Seastar, he’s worked on schema registries, async Avro handling, and modernizing low-level HTTP and library code—bringing both product-facing features and infrastructure refinements. His background includes designing sharded, shared-nothing messaging systems and embedded networking stacks, reflecting a rare breadth from microcontroller firmware to cloud-scale streaming platforms. Ben prioritizes simplicity and correctness over cleverness, and often surfaces non-obvious reliability gains by rethinking abstractions rather than adding complexity.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Maths, Physics, Further Maths, Computer Science, Maths, Physics, Further Maths at Park CollegeWillingdonMEng, Computer Systems Engineering, 2:1, MEng, Computer Systems Engineering, 2:1 at University of Warwick
English
Stackoverflow
154reputation
9kreached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (31)
avro10
docker10
c-language10
http10
kafka10
distributed-systems10
dockers10
redpanda10
cprogramming-language10
schema10
streaming10
async9
unit-testing9
cicd9
aio9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
redpanda-data/redpanda
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
Redpanda is a streaming data platform for developers. Kafka API compatible. 10x faster. No ZooKeeper. No JVM!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 3913 reviews, 1478 commits in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben's contributions primarily involve the development of features and enhancements within the Redpanda data streaming platform, with a focus on the schema registry component. Their work includes constructing and sanitizing global schemas using the Avro format. The user also made the make_avro_schema_definition function async, and implemented support for references. Additionally, the user implemented several unit tests, including one to detect invalid schemas.
realtimezookeeperdata-platformkafka-api10x
scylladb/seastar
Mar 2021 - Nov 2022
High performance server-side application framework
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 7 commits, 5 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the Seastar framework, focusing on enhancements to HTTP functionalities and core library components. They added new HTTP status types, and addressed deprecated syntax and compiler warnings. Furthermore, they refactored the code to leverage more modern C++ features, such as `std::invoke_result`, demonstrating proficiency in advanced C++ programming. Their contributions show a focus on maintaining and improving the core infrastructure of the project.
seastarc-plus-plusdpdkframeworkperformance
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