mattbenton

Senior full-stack developer and engineering leader with 14 years experience, 10 of which spent at Amazon.

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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 Pairing 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 Kubernetes CDK / Cloudformation Terraform GraphQL Rest NoSQL SQL

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.

Work: Ecologi

Engineering Lead

2023-current 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
  • Running process to define OKRs within engineering, creating proposed objectives, gathering feedback from stakeholders and drafting the final plan. Goal Setting OKRs Stakeholder Management
  • Created strategy for closing key data gaps and democratising data access across the company. Data
  • Worked on technical strategy for the acquisition of another company, Net Zero Now, performing technical due dilligence and leading the approach to product integration. Acquisition
  • 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

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
  • Overhauled testing practice to take us from a slow, manual testing and deployment process, to one that is fully automated. Test Automation Continuous Deployment
  • 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