Ben Weatherman

Lifelong programming polyglot, former CTO, and co-founder. I love solving complex problems with simple code, working with product owners to ship features, and mentoring teammates on code & career.

Joined ServiceUp, a marketplace connecting fleets with auto service shops, as a Senior Engineer and grew into VP of Engineering.

• Still ships a boatload of code and features across backend, frontend, and devops
• Sets technical direction across the TypeScript monorepo: backend services, customer-facing portals, data warehouse, and a layered ML strategy (rules → models → LLM → human-in-the-loop)
• Recruits and mentors the engineering team as it scaled from 5 to 15 engineers
• Builds a career rubric and promotes engineers into Senior, Staff, Principal, and Engineering Manager roles
• Represents engineering with product, design, ops, sales, support, recruiting, and the exec team

Worked on Apollo Federation, the open-source framework for composing GraphQL services.

• Contributed to the Federation 2.0 release, including work on the @shareable and @inaccessible directives
• Wrote and reviewed TypeScript across the federation, query planner, and gateway packages
• Triaged community issues and supported users adopting Federation 2
• Collaborated with product and DX on docs, examples, and rollout

Launched Literati Book Clubs, a platform for discussing books curated by influencers.

• Built graphql APIs to support iOS, Android, and web
• Broke down features into tickets, performed code reviews, organized team meetings
• Committed mostly django code, along with fairly large react and devops features
• Worked closely with product owners to define goals and experimented to find features users love

Led teams building all aspects of car insurance quotes. Advocated for simpler system designs, and closely collaborated with product owners to ensure both feature development and tech debt were addressed.

• Led team to build internal CCPA compliance system
• Led team to build an integration with TransUnion credit rating
• Led cross-team effort to standardize frameworks
• Coordinated meetups hosted by The Zebra, including groups like Open Austin

During a 1-year fellowship at the City of Austin, fostered a development culture based around empathy, compassion, and teaching.

• Helped create austin.gov to replace austintexas.gov
• Created NerdShops™ to teach designers to use git and content strategists to use the terminal
• Customized and deployed a CMS backend
• Developed a prototype CMS editor interface

I got to do all kinds of fun stuff building ordoro.com:

• Recruited & mentored the development team as it grew from 1 to 9 (as well as 3 interns)
• Evolved tech stack from single django app to multiple microservices and multiple UIs
• Wrote a boatload of testable & maintainable code
• Oversaw dev team interactions with outside groups including customers, support, sales, 3rd-party developers and investors
• Iterated on development process & cross-team release scheduling
• Partnered with local tech orgs such as Women Who Code & Open Austin
• Took on important non-tech duties like health insurance coordinator, office manager and cheerleader

Created prototype applications using the Facebook API. Spearheaded first use of mongo, elasticsearch and internal JSON APIs at Bazaarvoice. Worked closely with brands such as Ford and Benefit Cosmetics.

Developed everything from computer vision algorithms to Windows device drivers to C++ courses to user feedback sessions to robotic Lego monkeys. Also managed several small teams and projects. AMA!

Co-founder and co-organizer of the main python developer group in Austin, with monthly meetings that draw 30-50 developers to discuss a range of topics. This is now a part of the Austin Python User Group.

I played wheelchair basketball with the Austin Rec'ers. I wasn't very good.