# Benjamin Ford

> Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer at Ellevation Education

Location: Greater Boston, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/benjaminford

Senior DevOps & Platform Engineer with 15+ years of experience spanning application development, data engineering, and cloud infrastructure. Specialized in building internal developer platforms and operating production AWS environments for complex monolithic applications. Proven track record reducing deployment times by ~60%, enabling self-service provisioning of 180+ development environments, and owning critical infrastructure end-to-end as a sole contributor.

## Work Experience
### Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer @ Ellevation Education
Jan 2022 – Present
- Primary architect and sole owner of an AWS-based Internal Developer Platform (IDP) supporting concurrent isolated cloud development environments across the full engineering org
- Enabled self-service provisioning of 180+ development environments in 2025, eliminating dependency on unsupported local setups and reducing environment recovery time from days to <1 hour
- Developed AMI pipelines with automated validation to prevent platform drift and developer-blocking environment failures
- Migrated critical session/auth data from Couchbase to Redis (ElastiCache) via dual-write strategy, minimizing downtime and eliminating ~4 caching incidents per year
- Designed a weekly triage process to address a team-identified gap in engineering request visibility, giving teams transparency into ticket status and priority; solely facilitating and improving the process through stakeholder feedback for 1+ year
- Maintained centralized communication and intake processes, ensuring visibility and reducing ambiguity in cross-team request handling

### Software Engineer II @ Ellevation Education
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Greater Boston
- Sole contributor on a CI/CD pipeline optimization project reducing monolith application deployment time by ~60% through parallelization and pipeline improvements (Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
- Instrumented deployment pipeline with CloudWatch metrics and dashboards, enabling progress tracking and regression detection throughout the project
- Promoted to Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer based on project outcomes and demonstrated infrastructure expertise

### Software Engineer @ Ellevation Education
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Greater Boston
- Developed data ingest systems with C#, Python, and AWS Lambda supporting student and scheduling data pipelines
- Proactively owned infrastructure setup and design for data ingestion projects, collaborating with the Cloud Infrastructure team on networking, permissions, and security
- Established documentation practices to ensure maintainability and knowledge continuity across the team

### Research Engineer/Data Scientist @ Aptima, Inc.
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Woburn, MA

### Computer Scientist @ Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport
Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Naval Undersea Warfare Center
System Designer, Lead Java Developer, and Production Manager for a Learning Management System supporting the Non-Tactical Software Development Department.
Also maintained secondary positions as Lead Test Engineer, Quality Assurance Validator, Technical Support Liaison, and off-site Installation Logistics Manager.
Also mentored multiple new professional and new graduate research products that satisfied a number of Navy training requirements.


## Education
### PhD in Computer Science, Behavioral Game Theory, Artificial Intelligence
University of Southern California

### M.S. in Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth


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

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Source: https://flows.cv/benjaminford
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/benjaminford/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-31