Jake Benilov
Co-Founder at Quick People Ltd
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJake Benilov is a seasoned product and engineering leader with 16 years’ experience building user-led digital services, currently co-founder of Good Machine and director at Quick People. A Ruby hacker and ex-CTO, he blends hands-on backend development with product strategy, having shipped numerous GOV.UK publishing features and authored tooling for user feedback analysis across government. He’s led product and engineering teams from startups to public sector programmes—driving agile delivery, specification-by-example training, and measurable product iteration. An active open-source contributor, his work spans high-profile projects like alphagov/whitehall and FitNesse, where he improved publishing workflows and hardened test automation. With an academic background in mathematics from Oxford and LMU Munich, he brings analytical rigor and a pragmatic focus on meeting real user and policy needs.
16 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
BA Mathematics and Computation, BA Mathematics and Computation at University of OxfordMSc Mathematics, MSc Mathematics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
English, Russian, German
Stackoverflow
1,234reputation
25kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (20)
back-end-development10
testing10
fitnesse10
rails10
java10
javas10
activerecord10
ruby-on-rails10
test-automation10
postgresql9
command-line-interface9
junit9
html6
database6
bundler6
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
alphagov/whitehall
Mar 2014 - Mar 2016
Publishes government content on GOV.UK
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:117 commits, 74 PRs, 157 pushes in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jake primarily contributed to enhancing detailed guides within the GOV.UK publishing platform. Their work focused on adding functionality related to user needs and their associated Maslow Need IDs, as evidenced by the addition of the `need_ids` attribute to the `editions` table and `detailed_guide.rb` model. They also implemented features to display goals for associated needs and validated the format of the need IDs. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the application's code to align with new specifications.
govgovuk-publishing-frontendgovukgovernmentcontainer
unclebob/fitnesse
Dec 2009 - Sep 2013
FitNesse -- The Acceptance Test Wiki
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:31 commits in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Jake primarily contributed to the FitNesse project by adding features and enhancing testing capabilities. They implemented password authentication for the TestRunner, addressing security concerns. The user also refactored and extended the command-line arguments. Furthermore, they made several changes to the testing framework, including refactoring test code and ensuring consistent exception handling.
wikiacceptancefitnesse
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