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, and across the tech stack.

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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 Serverless Lambda DynamoDB
  • Launched new data products for external customers, key to the growth of this area of IMDb's business. Documentation AWS S3 SNS / SQS

Website Team – Sr. SDE

2016-2019 Seattle, WA

Tech lead on the team running IMDb's high scale website

  • Load testing and scaling ahead of high traffic events such as the Oscars. Scaling
  • 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, and significantly improving the percentage of pages with an associated image. 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
  • Designed and created a system for running consistency checks against the IMDb database that enabled us to guarantee that we had no data contradicting complex custom rules that we defined. PostgreSQL Perl

General

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 job roles, both technical and non-technical.

Promoted twice from SDE I (junior-engineer-straight-out-of-uni) to SDE III (Sr Engineer / Team Technical Leader).

Deeply involved in the career development of the engineers I worked with, giving feedback, and shepherding promotions through Amazon's tech promotions process.

Tech Skills

Front-end

Worked with foundational web technologies, modern technologies and frameworks.

HTML CSS Javascript

React Typescript Sass Webpack Tailwind CSS Next.js

Back-end

Built many services, working mostly in AWS with infrastructure-as-code.

Service-oriented-architecture Serverless

Node Java

AWS CDK / Cloudformation Lambda GraphQL Rest DynamoDB PostgreSQL

Other

Git Test-driven-development Bash Linux Agile Continuous Deployment

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.