Benjamin Trent
Senior Principal Software Engineer at Elastic
Greer, South Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Trent is a Senior Principal Software Engineer with 12 years of experience building scalable search, ML, and real-time systems across startups and enterprises. At Elastic he drives vector search and relevance work in Elasticsearch and Lucene, contributing production-grade fixes and performance improvements to widely used open-source projects. He blends an entrepreneurial, get-things-done mentality with disciplined planning—rebuilt products at Lattice and modernized services at Rackspace—while mentoring teams to execute complex initiatives. His hands-on contributions span core search internals (kNN/vector search), ML model integration (XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch), and WebRTC/video and API gateway systems. Based in Greer, SC, he pairs a Georgia Tech CS masters with a pragmatic focus on delivering measurable business value through well-engineered solutions. An uncommon detail: he routinely proves technology choices by implementing them himself, turning prototypes into production-ready features.
12 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Mathematics at Faulkner UniversityMaster's Degree Computer Science, Master's Degree Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
7,478reputation
623kreached
181answers
4questions
jquery
top-5%
audio
top-1%
google-chrome
top-5%
elasticsearch
top-5%
webrtc
top-1%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (56)
algorithm10
lucene10
transformers10
algorithms10
search-engine10
xgboost10
pytorch10
benchmark10
python10
mutex10
amazon-elasticsearch10
machine-learning10
benchmarking10
information-retrieval10
c1110
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
apache/lucene
Feb 2023 - Feb 2023
Apache Lucene open-source search software
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 494 reviews, 8 commits in 19 days
Contributions summary:Benjamin contributed to performance improvements and bug fixes within the Apache Lucene search software. Their work included removing unnecessary cancellation checks, fixing issues in the handling of large data sets, resolving integer overflows, and correcting a casting bug. The user also worked on several enhancements related to KnnGraphTester, demonstrating a focus on optimization and correctness within the search engine's core functionality.
nosqlfulltext-searchsolrapachesearch-engine
elastic/eland
Aug 2020 - Oct 2022
Python Client and Toolkit for DataFrames, Big Data, Machine Learning and ETL in Elasticsearch
Role in this project:ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:23 reviews, 20 commits, 28 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Benjamin contributed significantly to the machine learning aspects of the `eland` repository. Their work includes adding support for various XGBoost models, including multi-class classification with different objectives and boosters. They also integrated support for LightGBM and PyTorch transformer models, specifically for text-based tasks, enhancing the toolkit's capabilities for different NLP tasks. Furthermore, they added tests for the supported models and objectives and improved the NLP model import process with nicely defined types.
data-analysisdataframespythondata-sciencedataframe
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