Benjamin Pollack
Principal Engineer at ngrok
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Pollack is a Principal Engineer with 17 years of experience helping startups move fast by wearing many hats—from assembly-level desktop work to leading engineering organizations and shipping React SPAs. He has a proven track record of rescuing behind-schedule teams and turning them into templates for the organization, doubling team velocity through process, hiring, and focused technical work. Benjamin pairs hands-on backend contributions (including improvements to well-known projects like Active Merchant and work on the Factor language) with pragmatic infrastructure and performance debugging across build systems, storage, and deployments. Comfortable as a developer, manager, recruiter, or coach, he excels at identifying and eliminating where teams lose time while also improving developer productivity with modern tooling. Based in Raleigh, he brings startup grit and rare breadth—equally fluent in low-level systems and high-level product delivery.
17 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Computer Science, Bachelor of Science Computer Science at Duke University
Stackoverflow
27,974reputation
2.4mreached
69answers
42questions
mercurial
top-5%
windows
top-5%
java
top-1%
debugging
top-5%
wildcard
top-1%
macos
top-5%
Github Skills (46)
apim10
wildcard10
testing10
stack10
concatenation10
payment-gateway10
stacker10
java10
ruby10
netflix-eureka10
javas10
api10
payment-processing10
gateway10
spring-boot10
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
activemerchant/active_merchant
Oct 2017 - Dec 2018
Active Merchant is a simple payment abstraction library extracted from Shopify. The aim of the project is to feel natural to Ruby users and to abstract as many parts as possible away from the user to offer a consistent interface across all supported gateways.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:191 commits, 293 PRs, 336 pushes in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily worked on the `active_merchant/active_merchant` repository, contributing to the payment gateway library. Their work involved implementing features for specific payment gateways, particularly focusing on handling extra data requirements for Barclays Smartcard credits and supporting new payment methods, such as Colombia with Ebanx. The user also made modifications to existing code for improved functionality. Furthermore, the user focused on improving the overall maintainability, by introducing improved test suite and code improvements.
ecommerceaimadyenpayment-processingpayment
factor/factor
Jan 2013 - Dec 2020
Factor programming language
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 46 commits, 42 PRs in 8 years
Contributions summary:Benjamin primarily contributed to the Factor programming language repository by adding documentation and updating existing code. Their work included documenting the `compression.zlib` vocabulary, modernizing the Redis vocabulary to use the latest protocol, and adding documentation for the sequences.extras, math.statistics, and sequences.extras vocabs. The user also made changes to support the use of LibreSSL's libtls library and adapted the OpenSSL calls. Additionally, the user added support for SNI and fixed code.
script-enginecompilerprogramming-languagecompiledapl
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