Ben Sheldon
Chief Technology Officer at GitHub
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Sheldon is a seasoned technology leader and hands-on software engineer with 14 years of experience building web and civic-technology platforms that prioritize usability and real-world impact. Currently CTO at Frontdoor Benefits and a Senior Engineering Manager at GitHub, he combines product-minded engineering with strategic planning to unlock access to public benefits and scale mission-driven services. A prolific contributor to the Ruby ecosystem, Ben authored GoodJob and has contributed to major projects like Rails, concurrent-ruby, and GitHub’s rubocop presets, focusing on robustness, testing, and developer ergonomics. His background spans startups, civic nonprofits, and platform companies—shipping CLIs, dashboards, and large-scale Rails/Postgres systems while leading teams to reliable delivery. Ben’s approach emphasizes minimal, testable features that learn quickly and harden for scale, informed by early nonprofit leadership roles where he built capacity across organizations. An open-water swimmer and pragmatic engineer, he blends persistence and curiosity to solve thorny operational problems behind the scenes.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Institute for Nonprofit Management and Leadership Non-Profit/Public/Organizational Management, Institute for Nonprofit Management and Leadership Non-Profit/Public/Organizational Management at Questrom School of Business, Boston UniversityBS Mathematical Sciences, BS Mathematical Sciences at UC Santa Barbara
Stackoverflow
1,105reputation
46kreached
15answers
1question
heroku
top-5%
Github Skills (43)
rubocop10
ruby-rails10
rubygems10
rspec10
terminusdb10
rails10
terminal-app10
ruby10
wp-cli10
php10
gemspec10
gemfile10
executor10
activerecord10
threadpoolexecutor10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
bensheldon/good_job
Feb 2020 - Jan 2023
Multithreaded, Postgres-based, Active Job backend for Ruby on Rails.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:187 releases, 199 reviews, 681 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the project by implementing Rspec and Database Cleaner for testing, enhancing the test coverage and quality of the project's codebase. They also implemented the necessary modifications in the code to ensure that automated testing can be easily applied. The user demonstrated the ability to create a more robust testing infrastructure.
ruby-on-railsrailsrubybackendpostgres
assaf/vanity
Jun 2017 - Nov 2022
Experiment Driven Development for Ruby
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 7 reviews, 26 commits in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the back-end logic and functionality of the Ruby-based project. Their commits demonstrate experience in updating code for compatibility with newer Rails versions (Rails 5.1 and 6.1), including adjustments to template rendering and attribute updates. The user also focused on maintaining the project by releasing multiple versions and addressing Redis adapter issues, indicating a focus on stability and system improvements.
railsruby
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