# Ben Drees

> Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager

Location: Oakland, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/bendrees

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Pandora
Jan 2018 – Present | Oakland, California, United States
Helped migrate planning and trafficking components of $1 Billion ads business from Google to AdsWizz, an acquired subsidiary, without hiccups.

### Principal Engineer @ Atlassian
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
Worked on features for Statuspage - a service for communicating with customers about planned and unplanned downtime. Ruby, Rails, Javascript, React, MySQL, email, SMS.

### CTO @ Zenti, Inc.
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016
Led design and development of version two of the company's core technical asset, a stream-oriented classifier engine. Replaced Ruby/Redis with Java/Kafka. Increased throughput 100x. Created a cross-validation framework and system for tracking and visualizing classifier effectiveness over time. Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, JavaScript, Redis, MySQL, Python, Kafka, Zookeeper, AWS, Salt, Hadoop, Spark, Scala, JRuby, Java.

### Engineering Lead @ Zenti, Inc.
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015
Helped develop legal discovery and advertising applications and maintain an underlying Bayesian classifier engine handling emails and tweets. Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Redis, MySQL, Python, Kafka, Zookeeper, AWS, Salt, Hadoop.

### Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2010 – Jan 2013
Helped port freebase.com to Google infrastructure.  Provided oncall support for Freebase and Google Knowledge Graph.  Implemented insert, update, and delete operations of a next-generation graph database.

### Lead Architect @ Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
Jan 2005 – Jan 2010
Owned HTTP caching and distributed logging/monitoring systems. Served as resident expert in HTTP, caching, distributed performance analysis and fault diagnosis.  Metaweb was acquired by Google in July, 2010.  Python, C, Python + C, Squid hacking, Apache tuning, WSGI, MySQL, JavaScript, load balancing and content switching, Hadoop.

### Engineering Manager @ Applied Minds, Inc.
Jan 2001 – Jan 2005
Managed a small team of developers implementing prototypes of intelligence analysis tools for government and defense industry clients. Spent my final nine months in this role building the first usable version of the system that became Freebase, which was spun off as a new company, Metaweb Technologies, Inc., in 2005.  Java, XML, XML Schema, XSLT, RDF, RDF Schema, Sesame, PostgreSQL, Flash, functional and technical design, technical project management, recruiting.

### Senior Software Engineer @ eScore/Kaplan
Jan 2001 – Jan 2001
Led design and development of an XSLT-based courseware compiler. XSLT, Java.

### Senior Software Engineer @ CloudSource
Jan 1999 – Jan 2000
Helped develop a web site publishing engine.  C++, XML.

### Senior Software Engineer @ DoughNET, Inc.
Jan 1999 – Jan 1999
Helped deliver the web front end of version one of a system that enabled kids to use their parents' credit cards online, with contraints.  Java, Oracle.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Berkeley Systems, Inc.
Jan 1992 – Jan 1999
Helped develop outSPOKEN, the first screen reader for Windows, and the GUI Access Toolkit, the first Accessibility API. Served as lead client engineer on an Internet port of "You Don't Know Jack", a popular CDROM-based trivia game. C++, Windows hacking, cross-platform discipline, HTTP, TCP/IP, Apache, SQL, functional and technical design, technical project management.

### Programmer @ Kyocera Electronics, Inc.
Jan 1990 – Jan 1992
Developed desktop publishing applications for DOS and Windows.

### Programmer @ Talking Technology, Inc.
Jan 1989 – Jan 1990
Developed telephony applications for DOS.


## Education
### University of California, Berkeley


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/bendrees

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Source: https://flows.cv/bendrees
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/bendrees/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12