Benjamin Black
Staff Software Engineer at Better
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Black is a Staff Software Engineer in New York with 15 years of experience building full-stack, low-latency, and microservice-driven systems. He has led teams and shipped high-throughput infrastructure at Tumblr—creating a real-time 200GB/day Firehose, video transcoding, and low-latency ID generation—and now drives product and platform work at Better, including appraisal automation, underwriting queuing, and a custom authentication service for a microservices migration. Comfortable across backend and frontend, he also maintains practical open-source contributions from WebSocket and callback improvements in a Scala I/O library to a feature-rich Chrome extension for batch-opening links. He combines hands-on coding with interviewing, mentoring, and project planning, often improving reliability through testing and automation. Trained in AI and computer science at the University of Edinburgh, he brings both systems-level rigor and a pragmatic product focus to complex engineering problems.
15 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science with Honours, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science with Honours, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at The University of Edinburgh
Github Skills (17)
javascript10
browser-extension10
user-interface10
websocket10
chrome-extension10
chrome-app10
scala10
google-chrome-extension10
websockets-client10
html10
websocket-client10
chrome-plugin10
client-websocket10
jquery9
css9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
benblack86/linkclump
Sep 2010 - Jan 2023
Google chrome extension that allows you to open multiple links at once.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:109 commits, 30 PRs, 60 pushes in 12 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the front-end development of a Google Chrome extension. Their initial commit established the foundation of the extension's content script and popup, setting up the user interface and core functionality. Subsequent commits introduced features such as "smart select," exclude words, new window functionality, and enhancements to the options page. The user's work involved substantial changes to the JavaScript code, CSS, and HTML structure of the extension.
google-chrome-extensionchromegoogle-chromelinkschrome-extension
tumblr/colossus
Jan 2017 - Jan 2018
I/O and Microservice library for Scala
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 46 commits, 129 PRs in 1 year
Contributions summary:Benjamin's primary contribution involved modifying the `colossus/protocols/websocket/Websocket.scala` and related test files, suggesting work on WebSocket implementation and testing. Further contributions included modifications to the `colossus/service/Callback.scala` file, indicating involvement in the core functionality of the callback system and exception handling. These changes involved implementing features and debugging for improved functionality.
sbt-pluginplayframeworkscalasbtmicroservice
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