mattbenton

Senior full-stack developer and engineering leader with 15 years experience.

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Leadership

Leading and building teams, with a focus on high standards, mentorship, positive culture.

Team building Team direction and mission Mentoring Interviewing / Hiring

Pull requests Linting Testing Continuous integration/deployment AI-assisted development

Front-end

Worked with foundational web technologies, modern technologies and frameworks.

HTML CSS Javascript React Typescript Next.js

Back-end

Built and operated many services and back-end systems. Responsible for design, code, reliability, and infrastructure.

Service-oriented-architecture Infrastructure-as-code Serverless Node Java AWS Google Cloud Lambda CDK / Cloudformation Terraform GraphQL Rest NoSQL SQL

Work: Ecologi

Engineering Lead

2023-2026 Bristol, UK

Promoted to lead engineering across the company. Initially managed the team, before transitioning into being the most senior IC.

  • Manager of the engineering team through a difficult restructuring process, defining the plan to reduce, selection pools and selection criteria. Performance management Restructuring
  • Defined and delivered strategy to close key data gaps and democratise data access. Launched reporting with 93% adoption across the company. Drove revenue traceability from order to fulfillment from 29% to 100%. Data
  • Ensured every engineer at Ecologi was making the transition to working with AI-assisted tools, giving them space to learn and organising a hackday to generate ideas for how LLMs could improve our product. LLMs AI-assisted coding
  • Led transition from manual QA process with 4 QA engineers and weekly releases, to fully automated testing and continuous deployment, enabling multiple releases per day. Mentored and supported a QA engineer in transitioning to a software engineering role. Test Automation Continuous Deployment Mentoring

Zero Team — Tech Lead

2022-2023 Bristol, UK

Managing and providing technical leadership to the team building Ecologi Zero, a carbon accounting tool for small businesses.

  • Providing leadership over the delivery of countless new features that enabled us to go from 0 to over 1,000 customers. TypeScript GraphQL React MySQL
  • Created performance review process for engineers including self review and 360 feedback portions. Performance Reviews Feedback

Work: Candide

Gardens Team — Senior Engineer

2021-2022 Bristol, UK

Building and operating a ticketing platform for gardens and heritage attractions.

  • Created framework for building multi-page forms in React, first used to deliver support for selling tickets as gifts. Typescript React Next.js Cypress
  • Defined new approach to tech interviewing, including defining technical questions and introducing structured behavioural interviewing method. Interviewing Hiring

Work: Amazon/IMDb

Publishing Team – Sr. SDE

2019-2021 Bristol, UK

Tech lead on a team working on how IMDb data is made available to both internal and external customers.

  • Led the way on migrating the whole of IMDb to a federated GraphQL architecture, with more than ten services, across many teams, federated within the first six months. Typescript Node GraphQL Serverless Lambda DynamoDB
  • Launched new data products for external customers, key to the growth of this area of IMDb's business. Documentation Java AWS S3 SNS SQS
  • Qualified Amazon "Bar Raiser", meaning I was responsible for ensuring a high quality interview process and facilitating the final decision. Performed over 300 interviews for Amazon across many organizations and roles, both tech and non-tech. Interviewing Hiring

Website Team – Sr. SDE

2016-2019 Seattle, WA

Tech lead building and operating IMDb's high scale website.

  • First engineer into a new team, defining direction and mission, and later expanding to multiple teams. Leadership Product ownership Hiring
  • Started a pattern library such that a new design could be rolled out consistently across hundreds of pages. React Sass
  • Designed an approach to breaking down IMDb's monolithic website application into a suite of applications owned by vertical program teams. Java Microservices

Content Team – SDE

2011-2016 Bristol and Seattle

Working on how data is contributed to IMDb, and how it is vetted for accuracy.

  • Tech lead on a project to enable customers to upload images to IMDb for the first time, resulting in millions of images being uploaded. Service-oriented-architecture React Java
  • Owned the process of creating company-wide Java and Javascript coding standards, writing significant portions of the documents as well as gathering input from others and resolving disagreements. Java Javascript

Education

MEng Computer Science 1st class from University of Bristol

2007-2011
  • Scholarships for academic achievement from UBS Bank and Mysis Foundation.
  • Netcraft award for best Computer Scientist in the second year.

Bog-standard UK education

Childhood onwards

GCSEs, A Levels, etc.