mattbenton

Senior developer and tech-lead with 10 years experience at Amazon behind me.

During that time I worked in many different areas of the business, with a bias towards product-focused full-stack engineering.

Download PDF Version

Leadership

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

Team building Team direction and mission Mentoring Interviewing / Hiring Product ownership

Pull requests Linting Testing Pairing Continuous integration/deployment

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 Kubernetes CDK / Cloudformation GraphQL Rest NoSQL SQL

Work: Ecologi

Zero Team — Tech Lead

2022-current Bristol, UK

Building an emissions calculations tool to help businesses work out their carboon footprint.

More to come...

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 Chakra UI Cypress
  • Lead on key integration with third party ticketing solution, enabling rapid addition of new features to the platform. Product ownership Service-oriented-architecture
  • 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.
  • Won EPSRC summer bursary to develop work on “Vision based exploration for wheeled robots” (2009).

Bog-standard UK education

Childhood onwards

GCSEs, A Levels, etc.