Forest Balk
Senior Software Engineering Manager at ActBlue
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolForest Balk is a Senior Software Engineering Manager in Boston with nine years of experience building and operating high-scale payments, POS, and integrations platforms across consumer and merchant-facing products. He has led cross-functional teams at Grubhub and LevelUp, shipping mission-critical POS clients, hybrid integrations (including a unique Starbucks integration), and developer portals while improving availability, observability, and SLO-driven reliability. At ActBlue he now leads AAA for product engineering, applying his background in payments and secure access to support tools used by 100,000+ progressive campaigns. Known for pragmatic, end-to-end ownership, Forest pairs hands-on technical breadth—from Java/Kotlin and Python to event-driven Kafka systems and TypeScript front-ends—with operational rigor and a knack for shipping low-latency transaction flows. An early-career background building card and biometric payment systems gives him uncommon depth in payments infrastructure and regulatory-ready engineering.
9 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Computer Science at South Dakota Mines
Stackoverflow
41reputation
2kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (26)
git-log10
versioning10
windows-vista10
dotnet9
installer9
tcp-socket9
git8
transport8
hyper-v8
windows-service7
xml6
tcp6
windows6
point-of-sale6
soap6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
forestb/guides
Sep 2019 - Apr 2022
Contributions:2 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 7 months
forestb/advent-of-code-2017
Dec 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributions:63 pushes, 40 branches in 2 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.