# Ben Dauer > Passionate about creating simple solutions to complex problems. Location: Greater Boston, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/bendauer Effective at ramping up quickly, driving projects through collaboration with cross-functional and technical SME's, empowering junior engineers and delivering results. Outstanding communication with the ability to coordinate multiple projects from initiation to completion in an agile environment. I'm passionate about seeking simple solutions to complex problems. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ ContractSafe Jan 2025 – Present ### Principal Software Engineer @ Hometap Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States - Oversaw the final data migration of documents to a new framework. Identified performance concerns as we began hitting a bottleneck prior to the migration. Investigated Django ORM, generated SQL and execution plans supported by database SME on the latter. Identified slow queries and solutions including schema simplification, better indexing, and changed queries to derisk the data migration and improve maintainability. - Introduced an import linter, which established contracts for the dependency graph, to help identify coupling, relationships between applications in the monolith, broke out work to help remove some of the complex dependencies, in support of reduced side effects, improved maintainability, and an easier transition to a non-monolithic architecture. - Fulfilled a mission critical business need for payoff/paydown data capture when the lead stepped back, enabling a successful data tape in support of securitization without compromising application database as source of truth. - Acted as an SME for our data science team to assist in data aggregation across internal and external sources. - Investigated and implemented a major architectural change to no longer create a new homeowner application on application unlock, simplifying the technical lifecycle to improve maintainability. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Hometap Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 - Key contributor in cross-functional planning for mission critical projects, taking an active leadership role in solutioning the back office MPA (Django) -> SPA (React/DRF/graphQL) transition that better aligned with the skillsets of integrating teams and the design team’s expectation for web app capabilities. - In support of the work, investigated graphQL as a way to a.) speed up API design process, b.) reduce teams impacting each other, c.) revisit db entities carried into API layer. - Participated in tiger team to investigate/break up legacy database schema that coupled MPA pages to the database. Reduced rigidity, improved maintainability, enabled the team to make product-driven changes. - In support of improved communications and processes, a.) revisited our retro structure to create a safer space, b.) wrote pointing guide to improve cross-team alignment on estimates and improve accuracy, c.) created/led bi-weekly cross-team meeting to surface related work, reduce silos, help technical leads identify consulting SME’s, d.) advocated for shift away from maintainer model to reduce bottleneck. - Created layer on top of generic historical snapshots framework in Django to enable human readable snapshots, created a snapshot diff builder, to capture changes made when the homeowner application was unlocked, reducing the risk of missed changes/effort necessary by staff to identify what had changed. - Closely mentored other engineers by a.) unblocking without solving problems, b.) meeting regularly to support, build relationship, understand concerns, c.) identifying and encouraging around growth areas. - Established service patterns for pulling business logic out of the ORM. - Active on steering committees focused on release management, developer experience and improving code quality. ### Software Engineer @ Hometap Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Greater Boston - Worked in a legacy system to improve response handling, reducing crashes and the need for users to access and manually pull information from a third party dashboard. - Implemented functionality within the internal Django portal that limited available contract templates from Formstack to home's state, saving the signing and funding team additional manual effort. - Investigated and integrated a third party, AWS-integrated antivirus service for scanning uploaded documents, reducing risk from one attack vector.  - Helped to shape departmental culture, standardize process, consolidate documentation. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Pazien Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Newton, MA - Became the primary SME for the Admin Portal React frontend and Falcon-based API layer as well as a custom Python service for interactive reporting, templated on backend, generic frontend. Expanded functionality with features including simple and dynamic actions against multiple rows in dynamic tables and across tables, improving Customer Support and DevOps team performance. - Added a new processor to the payment processing report ETL pipeline, modified existing pipelines to meet merchant needs, using custom ETL services and MongoDB.    - Spent considerable time with the payment processing report building service to expand on standard reporting for users, becoming a second SME to the original developer. - As one of the first new hires on an established code base, documented processes for pushing code in Jenkins and adding new payment processors from fetching through data normalization at a high level, and at a low level added docstrings to functions/classes, comments to tricky logic, more meaningful variable names, reducing reliance on SME’s and enabling future hires, and current hires working on a new part of the code base, to spin up more quickly. ### Software Engineer II @ Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 - Optimized queries in Django ORM and on Realm for Android for our mobile event app, added new features. - Built a proof-of-concept MVVM Android app in Kotlin using Google Cloud Firestore, Auth and Storage. - Wrote an ETL script to pull data from a Google sheet, display up-to-date session information on a marker at each track’s room for the Augmented World Expo. ### Software Developer @ Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Cambridge, Massachusetts - Primary contributor to and maintainer of an Android social networking, augmented reality app. Originally built over two months for a VIP event that included leaders of industry, university, the DoD and local government officials. - Key contributor to the Android app’s REST API and to a VueJS+DRF project management app used by academic, commercial and governmental organizations for inter-organizational coordination. - Refactored code to improve performance and maintainability including a pattern recognition computer vision algorithm in objective c++ and Java, and a d3 visualization central to AFFOA's mission.  - Significant improvements to the member portal including: refactoring legacy code, building out an in-house search feature, query optimizations, full-stack reactive site features. ## Education ### Bachelor’s Degree Goddard College ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ben-dauer-10b994ba - GitHub: http://www.github.com/bdauer --- Source: https://flows.cv/bendauer JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/bendauer/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-28