Ben Somers - Principal at Somanyrobots Games

Ben Somers

Principal at Somanyrobots Games

San Francisco, California, United States

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Summary

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Rockstar

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Top School

Ben Somers is a Principal software engineer and seasoned technical leader with 17 years of experience building resilient backend systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling across startups and enterprise firms in the Bay Area. He has led engineering teams at Determined AI and Bain, driven payments and internationalization work at Stripe, and scaled early-stage platforms at HealthSherpa and Indiegogo, combining hands-on Ruby/Go/Scala development with DevOps and systems automation expertise. A pragmatic architect and manager, he has a track record of improving team practices, hiring with DEI focus, and owning roadmaps for security, test engineering, and cloud services. His open-source contributions to widely used projects like Chef Infra demonstrate deep operational knowledge—improving role storage, duplicate detection, and configuration reliability for configuration management at scale. Trained as a mechanical engineer at Yale, he brings a systems-thinking mindset to software reliability and scalable infrastructure design.

16 years of coding experience

13 years of employment as a software developer

Bachelor of Science - BS Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS Mechanical Engineering at Yale University

Github Skills (21)

cookbook10

mysql10

configuration-management10

html-template10

python-templates10

ruby10

chef-client10

code-templates10

automation10

apptemplates10

chef-solo10

automations10

cpp-templates10

replication10

rspec9

Programming languages (4)

C++GoRubyKotlin

Github contributions (5)

chef/chef

May 2013 - Jun 2014

Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:8 commits in 1 year 1 month

Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Chef Infra project. Their work involved modifying the `Chef::Role` class to enable the storage of roles in subdirectories, which enhanced the flexibility of the configuration management system. The user also added duplicate role detection to prevent conflicts and improved the handling of role loading from disk. These changes involved modifications to core Ruby code files and corresponding spec files.

devopsdeploymentansibleinfrastructureinfra

sous-chefs/percona

Nov 2012 - Jan 2013

Development repository for the percona cookbook

Role in this project:

Database Engineer / Database Administrator

Contributions:6 commits in 1 month

Contributions summary:Ben primarily focused on fixing and updating configurations related to the Percona MySQL cookbook. Their commits addressed issues with outdated MySQL syntax, particularly related to slow query logging. They corrected replication settings and corrected typos within configuration files, improving the reliability and maintainability of the cookbook. The user also copied settings between the slave and master configurations demonstrating work on server configuration.

cookbookmysqlperconachef-resourcemysql-database

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