Benjamin S.

Experience

• 

  Department of Employment and Workplace Relations

  Oct 2003 - Jun 2007

  Provided leadership, architectural direction, and managed the technical milestones of the project.• Developed and base lined projects using prioritised feature lists and function point analysis (FPA).• Provided leadership to medium (10+) sized team.• Managed and procured resources necessary for successful project execution.• Developed project planning documentation accounting for budgetary and time constraints.• Designed several corporate software solutions using C#, ASP.NET, AJAX, JavaScript, and SQL Server.• Established nightly builds with NAnt and Cruise Control, naming convention conformance using FxCop and automated unit testing with NUnit.• Worked with UCD (user centred design) team to guide user interface development throughout project, and embraced latest W3C web standards for HTML, CSS and JS. Show less Straight out of University, I was mentored by several more senior leads and developers. I was assigned mostly legacy codebases to make small patches in out-of-date technology, such as VB6 and COM+ components.I designed and implemented several small-scale web applications. Solutions of this era were very OO and GoF Design Pattern heavy.• Applied silly amounts of OO and design patterns using C# and .NET 1.1 and a heavy-handed in-house framework• Was mentored by “Class Technology” who provided a complex OO framework that would result in consistent (GoF inspired) architecture between code bases• Designed and made ASP.NET webforms apps, some with SAP integration.• Built and tuned relational databases.• Worked on a couple of business intelligence (OLAP) solutions using Analysis Services and BI Accelerator.• Maintained several legacy apps on Visual Basic, Classic ASP, COM+ and MTS. Show less

  • Technical Team Leader

    Jun 2006 - Jun 2007

  • Application Developer

    Oct 2003 - Jun 2006
• 

  Australian Federal Police

  Jul 2007 - Dec 2008

  Senior Analyst Programmer

  Here I got to apply integration theory (Enterprise Integration Patterns) to advise, analyse, design, and build message-based integration solutions (middleware) to glue between lots of siloed applications within the AFP and its sister partner organisations (e.g. Department of Immigration, etc).These integration solutions created tremendous efficiencies to several business processes (e.g. forensics, real time border control, etc), that previously did not exist or were done manually by humans.Here I was tasked to work with an existing investment in the BizTalk Server platform and was offered several weeks of training. I picked up the basics of BizTalk within weeks and starting using some of its more advanced capabilities including exploiting its publish subscribe based architecture to loosely couple components and events, business activity monitoring and the Rete based business rules engine (BRE). I also programmed and worked with several C# and VB code bases mainly around SOAP based web services, XSLT, WebSphere MQ and the canonical data model GJXML.A number of implementation agnostic message-based patterns were leveraged, including patterns such as claim checking, scatter gather, wiretap and sequential convoy.Languages: C#, Visual Basic, XLANG, PowerShell, SQLTechnologies: BizTalk Server, .NET 2.0, SQL Server, ReSharper, WiX, XmlSpy, SOAP, XSLT, XSD, IBM MQ Show less

• 

  Linfox

  Jan 2009 - Jul 2009

  Systems Integration Analyst Programmer

  In my senior role within the Systems Integration team, I was responsible for 24/7 BizTalk Server platform reliability. The hybrid environment at Linfox services hundreds of external partners from around the globe, processing millions of messages per week, whilst providing 24/7 quality service levels. We had a saying here, that any single lost message could be a million-dollar invoice (which literally they mostly were).Solutions I worked on such as the BevChain Brown Brothers solution had a heavy emphasis on integrating with SAP Logistics modules (i.e. the warehouse and freight management) and as a consequence quite a bit of bespoke ABAP and C# was needed.In addition to building several solutions, I worked the on-call roster that involved providing timely resolution, and in more challenging situation using non-destructive production debugging techniques. Here I built a basic incident management template to learn from our mistakes, with the hope of slowly reducing the insane amount of reactive firefighting we were constantly exposed to.Languages: C#, XLANG, PowerShell, SQL, JavaScriptTechnologies: ASP.NET, SQL Server, SAP, Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) Show less

• 

  C4 Communication Pty Ltd

  Jul 2009 - Jan 2010

  Technical Lead

  As technical lead worked within a creative team to help deliver some of Australia's most highly trafficked sporting websites, including nrl.com, afl.com.au and the v8supercars.com.au. Maintaining the reliability of these sites while aggressively delivering feature enhancements for our client, Telstra, was a difficult balance to strike. This was my first exposure to doing high scale web and left me with many bullet wounds and hard learned lessons. As technical lead I was on-call 24/7 and often doing after hours firefighting. One of the managers there had recently done his scrum master training, so we practiced Agile as formally as the environment would allow. This the first time I spent deep focus learning JavaScript, including jQuery which was raging at the time.Languages: JavaScript, C#, PowerShell, SQLTechnologies: DotNetNuke, ASP.NET, MVC, jQuery, FireBug, Aptana, Json.NET, jslint, SQL Server, MemCached, CodeSmith Show less

• 

  CSR

  Jan 2010 - May 2010

  Software Engineer

  In my contract role within the Applications Team was aided the existing permanent team to design and build a new greenfield project to integrate with business partner Bunnings Group. Here I was able to draw on my exposure to EDI and AS2 from my time in the logistics space at Linfox.At the time CSR had recently announced a huge demerger of its sugar business. This involved analysing hundreds of code bases and solutions to "break out" the sugar parts and unit testing them individually.Many deeply rooted bugs emerged, and I recall having to break out windbg which a Microsoft support engineer introduced me to years prior to gather forensics around some native CLR interop issues.Languages: C#, JavaScript, XLANG, PowerShell, SQLTechnologies: BizTalk Server, EDI/AS2, windbg, Entity Framework, PGP, Fiddler2, SoapUI, Beyond Compare (an incredible diff tool which a Dutch colleague "Olaf" taught me, that literally saved me hundreds of hours of complex XML diffing/merging, to which I will always be indebted) Show less

• 

  Stockland

  May 2010 - Dec 2010

  Software Integration Engineer

  Here I was embedded as a consultant in the implementation phase of an internal skunk works team called the "LEAP project". We reported directly to the CIO and were tasked with creating a seamless business process across siloed applications and fragmented business processes. This had been attempted in the past without success in the past (due to politics).Working out of head office (133 Castlereagh St, Sydney) I was part of a small team that designed and implemented the middleware between the siloed business areas which included their customer relationship division which run a big Siebel platform and the back-office accounting division which had a legacy JD Edwards platform. The production print-based paperwork (e.g. invoices, lease agreements) was also automated and stored in the corporate records management system, Objective, using SOAP API's (also never done before within Stockland at the time).Languages: C#, PowerShell, SQLTechnologies: BizTalk Server, SOAP, XML, XSLT, WCF, SQL Server (MSSQL), SoapUI, Siebel Show less

• 

  DWS

  Dec 2010 - Oct 2011

  Senior Software Consultant

  As a senior developer provided expertise in lots of diverse way including pre-sales presentations, software architecture, best practices to my favorite nuts and bolts software development to lots of customers across Australia, predominantly in the Sydney region. In my time here, clients I helped included CSR, DCCEE, Bovis Lend Lease and Sucrogen.Designed and built multi-dimensional data warehouse and OLAP cubes to better understand the impacts of emissions based on climate change policies across decades of data holdings. To the clients delight this provided deep insights into how to better manage Australia’s clean energy and emission targets.Languages: C#, JavaScript, SQL, PowerShellTechnologies: C#, SQL Server, Analysis Services (SSAS), ASP.NET, WCF, jQuery. Show less

• 

  Mexia Consulting

  Oct 2011 - Nov 2012

  Senior Software Engineer

  Levelled up Domino's Pizza competitive edge, by building high scale telemetry event system at 500+ pizza stores, backed by cloud messaging.Mexia, as a small startup specialised in building highly available and fault-tolerant hybrid integration platforms.In my time as a back-end software engineer, helped several customers obtain software and integration solutions to tough problems. The highlight being our work with Domino's Pizza Inc. around the build of a high throughput messaging platform, based on early 2011-circa build of Microsoft's "Azure Service Bus". Real-time telemetry data from individual pizza's store was captured and published back to head office for analysis and more intelligent decision making.At the time in-store systems running on Windows 2000 on low powered hardware. I designed and built a scalable 3 node BizTalk Server 2010 cluster solution that ran in Domino's head office, and a tiny (small resource footprint was key) .NET CLR 1.0 daemon process that was deployed out to the fleet of pizza store machines, to pub/sub millions of fine-grained data events back to the big HQ BizTalk Server cluster for ingestion. It was vital the program was resource efficient and did not lose data.Mexia’s founder (Dean) and I spent 3 weeks in Redmond with Microsoft undergoing a "perf lab" to vet the solution before switching it on in production. These were the Azure early adopter years when the Azure portal was built in Silverlight and its API was still coming together. Spending time in Redmond with the engineering team is one of my greatest career highlights.Mexia as a Microsoft gold partner, were engaged to run a series of high-quality Azure technical training. I ran nearly a dozen 3-day Azure boot camps out of the Microsoft offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.Languages: C#, SQL, PowerShellTechnologies: C#, BizTalk Server, Azure Service Bus, StreamInsight, WCF, ReSharper, Reactive Extensions (Rx), SQL Server, TFS Show less

• 

  Department of Social Services (DSS)

  Nov 2012 - Dec 2013

  Full Stack Engineer

  After moving back to Canberra (our hometown) with my wife, I picked up some contract work in the Government sector.As part of the NDIS (National Disability Scheme) program of work announced by the Gillard government, was bought on as a contractor to accelerate an urgent greenfield body of work around the delivery of two large public facing web portals coined the "Participant portal" and the "Provider portal". An EOFY delivery had somehow been promised.Initially I lead the design and build of the "participant portal", which broke new ground for the Department by offering self service capabilities to the general public by integrating directly into legacy Siebel and SAP systems and doing federated OAuth access control with myGov. The ~15-member team worked together using agile practices facilitated by Jira GreenHopper. The success of the first portal, lead the way for second larger and more complex "provider portal" which involved financial transactions.Some challenges I recall we faced: Strict usability standards (WCAG AAA) compliance which was audited throughout the project by external vendor, broad and legacy browser compatibility including IE6 support, and several penetration testing checkpoints through the development run by a local cyber security consultancy.The federated authentication model of the solution was particularly exciting, provided a SAML based single sign-on experience with myGov. In the case of the Participant Portal, it was the first web application outside of its creator, DHS, to successfully integrate with myGov.Both projects were deemed a big success by the Department and acknowledged and awarded by the CIO.Languages: C#, Typescript, SQL, PowerShellTechnologies: AngularJS, REST API's, ASP.NET MVC and web API, customised Bootstrap, OWASP, WCAG. Show less

• 

  Australian Customs and Border Protection Service

  Jan 2014 - Jan 2016

  Technical Lead

  Here I helped to transform the process of clearing an Australian border by saving travelers 75,000 hours per month in clearance procedures, by leading the design & build of award-winning automated departures solution.I was responsible for a portfolio of 24/7 mission critical business applications relating to the business of border control and passenger management. The reliability of these systems had severe consequences, often resulting in front page news headlines.This was a fun environment to work in due to the number of hardware vendors and devices (such as CCTV control systems, biometrics, smart gates, passport readers etc).I maintained and enhanced various components of the famous PACE (Passenger and Clearance Evaluation) system, a resilient C backend that is responsible for providing all airport and seaport-based border security.The highlight was my lead role on the 2015 “Departure’s project”. This involved rolling out a new generation of smart gates, establishing new vendor partnerships (VisionBox) and streamlining the business process that a passenger needed to undergo in order to depart an Australian airport. Under an aggressive deadline (15 months), we pushed the boundaries and it was a rush.My job while not pitching in with the development work I worked with vendors, wrote design specs (e.g. API that would allow the necessary smart gate interactions to occur) and keeping the development team (~10) focused by carefully planning out the functionality that would be included in each sprint.The solution was a big success, resulting in the complete automation of Departure's clearance checks and was recognised by the World Customs Organisation (WCO) for rendering exceptional service to the international Customs community.Technologies: Java EE 6, WebSphere, IntelliJ IDEA, JAX-WS SOAP services with WS-Security digital signatures, JPA ORM, CDI, SSA NAME3, MQ series 7.x, DB2 10.5, Oracle, Linux, AIX, Maven, Jenkins, SoapUI, Git Show less

• 

  Australian Government Department of Human Services

  Jan 2016 - Dec 2016

  Senior Java Software Engineer

  Worked on giant monolithic Java EE midrange platforms for Medicare.In the Medicare citizen applications section, I designed and made enhancements to backend Medicare and myGov software. Source code I worked with was ancient and lacked in many software engineering best practices. Team retention was also low, with large teams of contractors coming and going.The business areas that we strived to serve, were subject to a constant stream of policy changes and reform initiatives. Compounding this, the complex, and legacy nature (i.e. mainframes) of this environment, required fast and effective communication to build trust relationships quickly to gain needed domain knowledge, strong analytical skills and creative problem solving.The culture here was a shock to me and the way software was being built and maintained here. It was my mission to improve the culture in some way and level of excitement around building software. I worked with the team to establish a Java style guide, created several Jenkins based CI pipelines and SonarQube dynamic analysis to raise awareness to bad practices and security issues. Attended, presented and evangelised the internal Java User Group (JUG).Languages: Java, Groovy, JavaScript, SQL, BashTechnologies: Java SE 7, Java EE 6, IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 8.5, IntelliJ IDEA, JAX-WS SOAP services, Hibernate, AngularJS, Linux (RHEL), Maven, SonarQube, FindBugs, OWASP, WCAG, Jenkins, SoapUI, Subversion, Bash scripting Show less

• 

  Australian Federal Government

  Dec 2016 - May 2022

  Designed several contemporary distributed, scalable and fault tolerant software architectures based on containerisation. Mostly targeting on-prem air grapped Kubernetes cluster with the ability to adapt to cloud where possible.Led the development of several small scale systems, where possible driving adoption of these architectural patterns and underpinning technologies (Kubernetes, docker, Linux, etc), with the hope of breaking the mold of building traditional monolithic designs within the internal development teams. For the internal software architectures themselves, I infused my software designs with principles from SOLID, GoF and DDD, with the aim of creating cohesive, modular and pliable software that could adapt and evolve as the overall system would ultimately need to.Worked on large scale distributed analytical system that harvested intelligence from crude unstructured data. Presented many challenging issues in the space of scale, availability, node coordination and consensus.Crafted CI/CD pipelines in combination with Kubernetes for running on-demand build, update and verification workloads as containers themselves on the cluster. Created automation of nightly container base images updates.Languages: Typescript, C#, Python, SQL, Painless, BashTechnologies: Elasticsearch, Kubernetes (OpenShift and AKS), Docker, Linux, Helm, React/Redux, PostgreSQL, Keycloak, Jenkins, .NET 6, MinIO, Nginx, HAProxy, Ansible, OAuth, Azure Show less Freed ~15 FTE in various areas, by building clever software solutions, integrating systems and data, and providing analytical capabilities that previously never existed.Built scalable back-end API's using technologies such as NiFi and Elasticsearch, and contemporary web front-ends using React/Redux and its supporting tool chain (nodejs, eslint, webpack, babeljs, tailwind).Created and configured CI/CD build pipelines using Jenkins in combination with Kubernetes for running build and verification workloads. Performed general Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 aka RHEL) administration.Evangelised better software engineering practices and automation of everything possible. I enjoyed participating in and witnessing the positive developer impact moving the engineering teams over to a contemporary devtools stack based on BitBucket, Jenkins, Artifactory and OpenShift.Languages: Typescript, C#, SQL, BashTechnologies: React, Redux, Tailwind CSS, Elasticsearch, .NET 5 (dotnet core), Kubernetes, OpenShift, Apache NiFi, RabbitMQ, Docker, PostgreSQL, Azure, Git, Keycloak Show less

  • Senior Software Engineer

    Jul 2019 - May 2022

  • Full Stack Developer

    Dec 2016 - Jun 2019
• 

  Chayson Tech Pty Ltd

  Feb 2021 - now

  Principal Software Engineer
• 

  Microsoft

  May 2022 - Apr 2023

  Senior Software Engineer

  Microsoft Azure’s Networking division is designing, building, and operating critical network infrastructure our clients rely on every day, transforming a pile of servers into a connected cloud. We are responsible for ensuring the reliability of these networks, in the face of constant change, relying on cutting-edge research and a stellar engineering team. We have built a large cloud thus far but the best is yet to come as we continue expanding at a rapid pace. Our division is responsible for a large diversity of technologies and challenges, including software defined networking, software load balancing, physical fiberoptic cables, software managing how to route packets across a global network as fast as possible, DNS, protection against DDoS, and many other challenging problems. As an engineer and leader within Azure Core Networking I am passionate about delivering value to customers in mission critical environments, enjoy a growth hacking culture and am eager to play one of the most important long games for Microsoft.I actively work with other teams in Azure Core Networking, participating in architectural and design reviews, deliver software components with high quality. My role not only involves collaborating across the broader Azure organization but also includes working with external Microsoft customers. The software and problems I solve has high visibility in an area of large and expanding investment for Azure.Inside Azure Networking, we take a SRE view of the software we craft, taking ownership of it from the design phase through implementation to production. As part of this ownership model, I actively participating in an on-call rotation, which includes creating/updating SOPs, Troubleshooting Guides, monitoring systems, mitigating/restoring network incidents and deep-dive analysis of root causes of outages. Show less

• 

  Australian Federal Government

  Feb 2023 - now

  Full Stack Engineer