# Tal Ben-Ari > Software engineer and technical lead specializing in building distributed systems and cloud platforms Location: Mountain View, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/talbenari I'm a staff engineer who's excited to start working soon at Okta on the Universal Directory team! But most recently I was a tech lead on VMware's Carbon Black Cloud. As an engineer, I usually spend my time designing new features and microservices, planning seamless migrations to enhanced cloud capabilities, and writing code the rest of the time. In the past I've run daily standups, sprint planning sessions, and the occasional initiative-wide operations meeting. I also find myself mentoring/advising other engineers, and they know they can always reach out to me for help. I take pride in the quality of the architectures and applications I build; I know how to build elegant and mature systems that meet SLOs, achieve consistency guarantees, and are amenable to maintenance and future improvements. On an unrelated note - I'm also really interested in PL theory and its real-world applications. Especially interested to see how symbolic execution and program synthesis evolve over the next few years. I play around with Rust and TypeScript in my free time, and I'll dabble occasionally with Haskell and Elixir. ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Okta Jan 2024 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Staff Software Engineer @ Okta Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area Engineer on the Universal Directory team. Our team is responsible for users, groups, realms, and related resources and functionality in the Okta product. In my first ~1 year in this role, I worked on a wide variety of features. I have developed end-user features, like the "bulk assign people to a group" workflow, as well as more complex systems, like our event-driven "user classification" pipeline, a near-real-time reporting tool powered by Flink and Snowflake. Over the past 18 months I have been working hard on a project I "co-founded" and helped get funded within the company. This project will significantly improve our customers' experience and pave the way for a huge number of future innovations, and we're finally close to cutting a release! ### Senior Software Engineer, Carbon Black @ VMware Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Palo Alto, California, United States Team Lead on cloud-native security for the Carbon Black Cloud. My team released Container Image Scanning for Carbon Black in April 2021, enabling customers to evaluate their container images for vulnerabilities and take security actions (or alerts) based on user-defined policies. Near the end of my tenure, my team started overhauling Carbon Black's AuthN and AuthZ solution, planning to provide customers with a wider variety of IDP capabilities and enable tighter integrations with other VMware products. We planned on making the upgrade seamless for existing customers while also catering to federal customers by making our service FedRAMP compliant. ### Software Engineer, Carbon Black @ VMware Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Palo Alto, California, United States Heavily involved in design and architecture phase of new product offering, VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Protection (CWP), as it was built from the ground up. Developed the very first microservice in CWP as a proof of concept; bootstrapped application code, created GitOps-based CI/CD pipeline, built Helm charts and Terraform scripts, and established integrations with other services in the Carbon Black Cloud. Designed mechanism by which CWP developers could automatically deploy parallel instances of their microservice to AWS for real-world testing and debugging. Led workshops and seminars in order to help team learn about Kubernetes, Helm, and other tools. Participated in the hiring committees for dozens of high-level CWP engineers in the US and India, as well as for the University Propel program. Assisted the Corporate Development team in the acquisition of a startup; performed technical due diligence and presented findings to executive team, ultimately leading to a successful acquisition. ### Software Engineer, AppDefense @ VMware Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Palo Alto, California, United States Developed new metrics for AppDefense: response time histograms, data ingestion throughput, COGS, etc. Worked with small team to refactor AppDefense monolith into smaller pipelined chunks, leveraging AWS Kinesis for improved durability, scalability and fault tolerance; tracked results of these efforts using aforementioned metrics. Worked with ML researchers to develop new feature — ML-powered risk analysis on command-line arguments — resulting in measurably fewer false positive and false negative alerts for customers, and better risk score calculations overall; leveraged AWS SQS and a Python worker for great scalability results. Subsumed into Carbon Black shortly after Carbon Black was acquired by VMware. ### Software Engineer @ Intrinsic (acquired by VMware) Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California Architected, improved, and maintained the core Node.js sandboxing and virtualization solution, written primarily in JavaScript and C++. Introduced new capabilities to the policy engine, like MongoDB interposition, and generalized our multi-sandbox solution to handle more use cases. Worked with current and prospective customers to help them integrate our security solution into their applications. ### SDE Intern @ Microsoft Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Redmond, Washington Created a Cognitive Services TypeScript SDK, with an Azure App Service integration. Developed a web application demo for the Microsoft Custom Vision Service and API. Provided valuable feedback to the Cognitive Services teams and future customers. ## Education ### Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science UC San Diego ### Computer Science Diablo Valley College ### High School Acalanes High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/talbenari --- Source: https://flows.cv/talbenari JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/talbenari/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01