Ben Ransford
Staff Software Engineer at Stripe
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
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RockstarBen Ransford is a Staff Software Engineer at Stripe and a cybersecurity-focused technologist with a track record of founding and productizing security solutions for high-risk domains like medical devices. He combines academic rigor—from award-winning security research and battery-free systems—with startup grit as cofounder and CTO/CEO of Virta Laboratories, where he led patented hardware and ML-backed anomaly detection work and secured an NSF grant. At Stripe he contributes to production-grade reliability and observability (notably improving smokescreen’s error handling, metrics, and stability) while shaping company-wide security practices. Comfortable across embedded firmware, cloud services, and systems engineering, he brings a rare blend of research pedigree, hands-on engineering, and entrepreneurial leadership. An under-the-radar strength: he has repeatedly turned deep vulnerability research into practical, ship-ready defenses that attracted both industry adoption and funding.
6 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (9)
error-handling10
go10
metric10
testing10
networking9
github-ci4
docker4
dockers4
githubaction-workflow4
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
stripe/smokescreen
Sep 2019 - Dec 2022
A simple HTTP proxy that fogs over naughty URLs
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:18 reviews, 38 commits, 22 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the smokescreen project by implementing crucial improvements related to error handling, metrics, and system stability. They addressed errors in loading CRLs, improved connection error reporting with detailed metrics, and refactored the metrics system for better maintainability and testability. The user also added and refined tests, demonstrating a commitment to code quality and thoroughness, along with a focus on performance and reliability.
http-proxy
ransford-stripe/smokescreen
Dec 2021 - Feb 2023
A simple HTTP proxy that fogs over naughty URLs
Contributions:15 pushes, 8 branches in 1 year 2 months
urlsnaughtyproxyhttp-proxyreverse-proxy
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