Ben Rabinovitch

Summary

  • I'm a technology leader with a passion for building and scaling highly effective organizations of motivated people who enjoy coming to work every day. Balancing the needs of the organization with those of the people in it, finding the right level of process while planning for growth, and building diverse and engaging cultures are the things that get me excited to come to work every day.
  • Most recently, I've spent a number of years in a new problem space in Fintech, specifically focused on fundamental research on public equities in North America and internationally. Our team's goal was to streamline and standardize the research process for financial analysts regardless of their sector focus. Read more about my time at Canalyst and Tegus below.
  • In the past I've been an active member of the Vancouver DevOps Days organizers group, hosting conferences where new ideas are explored and where companies and individuals are able to build their professional networks. This has also provided me with opportunities, as a leader of professional software development organizations, to encourage and teach skills to folks on how to attend conferences to get the most benefit, how to present and engage audiences of all sizes as a speaker, and also afterwards to their colleagues.
  • Having been a participant of the Vancouver Polyglot Computing Science Reading Group, in which we read, analyzed and discussed two published academic papers in the field of Computing Science per month, I have taken the concept into the workplace and created a similar group where topics range from survey papers around culture and process in the industry, to complex distributed systems algorithms, to operating system optimizations, and anything else that's current. This has proven to be an excellent way to build engagement and encourage professional development in the workplace, and creates motivation to keep up with industry trends at the same time.
  • I have spent some time working at an Andreessen Horowitz funded startup that produced a new flash-based, scale-out storage solution for private enterprise cloud storage. I worked on one of the software products in the suite of applications based on a proprietary configuration of commodity hardware. Our release process was founded on the principles of continuous integration and comprehensive unit, integration and system testing. Read more about my time at Coho Data below.

Relevant Experience

  • Director of Engineering, Analysis, Tegus
    • 2022 to 2023
    • www.tegus.com
    • Focused on integration of Canalyst staff, products, and data into Tegus processes, systems, and data architecture, with ownership of the Analysis vertical in partnership with Directors of Product Management and Product Design
    • Managed a team of more than 25 people including multiple managers, while simultaneously coaching and mentoring another 3 managers each with 6 to 10 people reporting to them. I advocated for quarterly performance reviews, with a process that was lightweight enough to not overburden managers while providing structured feedback to peers and reports in support of career growth and progression. I lead the successful hiring of the first outside Engineering Manager for Tegus, onboarded them, and supported their successful integration into leadership of a team that I had been managing
  • Director of Engineering, Canalyst
    • 2016 to 2022
    • canalyst.com
    • Canalyst was acquired by Tegus in August, 2022
    • I built a culture where respect, communication, professional development and doing excellent work were all highly valued, which contributed to extremely high employee retention. I was responsible for designing our Engineering hiring process, implementing it and growing the team from zero. I held weekly one on ones with each of my direct reports where performance, coaching and career development were a major focus, based on a proprietary two-track career ladder that we constructed in-house.
    • In the company's infancy I collaborated directly with the CEO for Product Management, and as we grew we hired folks specialized in that area who we continued to partner closely with and designed processes and communication channels to streamline our continued excellence through growth
    • At the time of acquisition I was directly managing approximately 10 people and coaching another 3 Engineering Managers who reported to the CTO, while continuing to lead recruiting, culture and product development excellence across the department. As hiring locally in Vancouver grew more challenging and we shifted to remote work when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we expanded our scope across the country, and also oversees looking for highly skilled people wanting to relocate to Canada. We hired approximately 10 people from Brazil, India, Ghana, South Africa and other countries who began work as oversees contractors and eventually we assisted them in immigrating to Canada to become employees of Canalyst
    • We built modern cloud-based distributed SaaS products designed for high-availability in multi-tenanted application settings. Priority wad placed on test driven development that supported a continuous delivery process so that our users always had access to the most recent work we had to offer. A strong focus was placed on empathetic leadership and a zero-blame environment for professional development for everyone on the team
  • Senior Software Engineer, Coho Data
    • 2015 to 2016
    • www.cohodata.com (no longer active)
    • Agile, release-driven development
    • Our team was responsible for a responsive, asynchronous web-based management tool for a complex scale-out storage solution
    • Fostered a culture of respectful code review processes to engage in growth and professional development
    • Constructed a new development environment that reduced setup time from one week down to ten minutes
    • Refactored preexisting code in order to construct a robust unit testing framework to ensure higher quality production of code that resulted in lower ongoing maintenance costs
  • Head of Engineering, Eventsage
    • 2012 to 2015
    • www.eventsage.com (no longer active)
    • Hired and trained a young team that was responsible for designing and developing a brand new concept from the ground up. We employed rapid prototyping principles to iterate on features very quickly and push small modules live as quickly as they were ready. We strove for total testing coverage using established testing frameworks and continuous integration tools to reliably ensure a production environment free of preventable bugs
    • Ran weekly one on ones with everyone, focused on current challenges and career growth based on a freely available career ladder published by thought leaders in the software development industry
  • Lead Software Engineer, Tristorm Product Design Inc.
    • 2010 to 2012
    • www.tiipz.com (no longer active)
    • Rapid, lightweight development focused on multiple releases weekly from a four-person team. The project was built with Django web-framework and was heavily reliant on current web technologies like CSS3 and JavaScript.
    • Primary focus on server side development with Django in addition to implementing the site's extensive analytics and statistics features as designed by our Market Research Analyst
    • Responsible for three major products:
      • A mobile market research and engagement platform for Microsoft Windows Phone's two-day launch events in five major US cities
      • A mobile market research and engagement platform for the Calgary Flames featured prominently at three early season games
      • A powerful desktop web browser site used to brand and otherwise customize mobile market research experiences on Tiipz's new mobile platform for various clients like The Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival in April 2012 and Best-Buy's QR code campaign found in Best-Buy flyers across Canada in April 2012

Education

  • Bachelor of Computing Sciences
    • Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia
    • www.cs.sfu.ca
    • Concentration in Information Systems