Resume

Ben Hekster
PO Box 391852, Mountain View, CA 94039-1852, USA
+1-650-5753346
ben@hekster.org
http://www.hekster.org/

Summary

Principal Software Engineer with 20+ years in high-performance computing and team leadership delivering scalable and real-time analytics solutions. Excels in object-oriented design and analysis (OOA/OOD). Creative, hands-on, independent thinker. Team player, with great spoken and written communication and conflict resolution skills.

Seeking a challenging position in architecture/design, development, team leadership; in high-performance/low-latency computing.

Skills

Programming languages:	C++17, C99, Python, NodeJS
Cloud infrastructure:	GCP, AWS; Kubernetes, MongoDB

Employment

February '22 - current	Relyance AI, San Francisco, CA Principal Software Engineer of a cloud-native data privacy SaaS product in GCP and AWS, and led source code analysis team as Scrum Master: contributed to Python-based source code analysis for data privacy GCP monitoring/alerting for a cloud-native Kubernetes product refactored Docker microservice infrastructure to support SOA, reducing build sizes by 75% established a tailored Scrum cadence; reduced debilitating WIP backlog by 80% contributed to automated testing (Playwright; NodeJS)
September '17 - January '22	FogHorn Systems, Sunnyvale, CA As Principal Staff Engineer on an edge computing IIoT product: designed Python Streaming API, implemented in C++17, for real-time analytics, integrating TensorFlow, TFLite, TVM, and OpenVINO optimized stream processing, achieving 1000x speed increase and 90% memory reduction led local and remote teams using Scrum, driving hiring and performance reviews
May '13 - September '17	BlueKai (acquired by Oracle), Cupertino, CA As Principal Software Engineer: architected C++11 graph database with transparent cluster rebalancing, with 290k/s ops at sub-ms latency, never crashing in production developed front end on nginx designed ‘ID space’ architecture which integrated efforts of other groups at the company pioneered Scrum and CI/CD, integrating QA into development workflows
March '09 - March '13	DigitalGlobe, Walnut Creek, CA (headquarters in Longmont, CO) As Senior Software Engineer: led a development team as Scrum Master, coordinating satellite office operations with HQ architected high-volume geospatial image (GIS) processing system written in C++ and Java, and GPU-based image processing developed a Win32/Linux cross-platform GUI in C++ for viewing image strips
1994-2001	Held engineering and leadership roles at SS8 Networks (Milpitas), CaseCentral (San Francisco), Minds and Technologies (Palo Alto), ReleaseNow (San Carlos), BackWeb (Ramat Gan, Israel), and Odyssey Interactive Multimedia (Herzeliya, Israel); focusing on C++ and cross-platform development.

Education

1986-1992

University of Twente, Netherlands

MSEE (cum laude) with additional Computer Science and additional Pure Mathematics components. Thesis in reflective object-based compiler architecture. Internships at Apple Computer, Macintosh System Software (Cupertino), and University of Oulu (Finland).

June '90 - January '91

Apple Computer, Cupertino-- Macintosh System Software department

Internship, development of an Installer script development tool (Object Pascal).

August '89

University of Oulu, Finland

Internship, implementation of a bulletin board and file-exchange system for PC clones (Turbo Pascal).

Independent

Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Amateur Radio Technician Class license.

Undergoing flight training for Private Pilot certificate (PP-ASEL); post-solo but pre-checkride.

President Darrow Farm Homeowners' Association.

2020-current	Design and hardware implementation of embedded projects, targeting Nordic nRF (Cortex M4), STM32, and PIC18 platforms. USB general aviation radio panel for use with X-Plane MIDI processor
2020-current	Wrote solutions manuals for mathematics textbooks A First Course in Graph Theory using Wolfram Mathematica, and Differential Geometry using LaTeX, and Abstract Algebra.