# Ben Chandler > Staff Software Engineer at Contrast Security Location: Portland, Maine, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/benchandler I'm a programmer and former Scrum Master with a background in Python / Django / Django Rest Framework and an education in computer science, mathematics, and Java. I care about the impact of my work on others and I'm happy to go the extra mile when its going to help somebody else; I encourage co-workers to come to me for anything. I strive to write readable, well-tested, well-documented code, and to support my team in doing the same. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Contrast Security Jan 2022 – Jan 2025 | Portland, Maine, United States I was a team lead on one of the platform teams at Contrast. My main role was to improve stability and predictability of the software and do regular support rotations. I worked a lot with EC2, automating spinning up EC2 instances and configuring IAM roles and S3 buckets to test that our on-premises software could install and run as expected on various OS including Windows and several flavors of Linux. I also worked extensively on CI and on Mysql performance and Mysql/Postgresql compatibility. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Blackhawk Network Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | Portland, Maine Area Cashstar was acquired by Blackhawk Network in 2017. For about a year I was a senior engineer continuing to maintain and improve on the giftcard platform with Python/Django and using Scrum and Jira. I also helped organize our summer internship program and continued to assist with production support. After some time I took the training and was made a Scrum Master which I did for about 18 months - while continuing to contribute as a team member at about half time or so. In that role I focused on facilitating, training, coaching, and trying to improve our practices sprint by sprint. As part of that, I travelled to Kyiv to work in person with our Ukrainian contractor colleagues for a few weeks in 2018 which, besides being personally awesome for me, helped bring the team together. The most important thing to me as a Scrum Master and especially during a time of remote work was to help foster an environment where everyone is included and able to speak their mind. ### Software Engineer @ CashStar Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Portland, Maine I worked on a Scrum team using Python/Django, as well as JS/React, to create and support eGift card products. Projects I worked on included building on a promotions platform, modernizing our user experiences, distributing eGift cards over Twitter, and of course production support. One of the projects I helped build was CashStar Product e-Gifting. This product won a PayTech award from FinTech Futures for best new Ecommerce initiative of 2018 - https://www.bankingtech.com/2018/07/paytech-awards-2018-and-the-winners-are/ Almost every day I did code review, had scrum meetings, wrote code, and investigated a bug. My everyday tools included Hipchat, PyCharm, Mercurial (and later, Git), Sequel Pro, Sublime Text, and Bitbucket. ### Computer Science Tutor @ University of Southern Maine Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Portland, Maine Tutored topics including basics of coding, using an IDE, Java, and object-oriented programming concepts like classes, subtyping, and polymorphism. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science University of Southern Maine Jan 2007 – Jan 2013 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ben-chandler-11b28925 --- Source: https://flows.cv/benchandler JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/benchandler/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23