Benjamin Kahn
Software Engineering Management
Passionate and technical Engineering Leader with a sound record of solving complex problems by guiding teams, stakeholders, and users together to formulate solutions. Adept at using interpersonal abilities encouraging and guiding team members to design, develop and implement innovative engineering products. Seeking a position in which I can use my deep expertise and years of experience to elevate team members and advance engineering processes.
- Team Management
- Budgeting
- Coaching & Mentoring
- Career Development
- Problem Solving
- QA
- UX
- Business Analysis
- Content Management
- Productivity Enhancements
- Open Source
- Community Relations
Work Experience
Red Hat (Raleigh, NC) Feb 2006 - May 2023
Manager of IT Platform Owners, Remote Oct 2019 - May 2023
Built the team that managed the document management platforms internal employees use every day. Created processes to coordinate business stakeholders, internal development teams, and external vendors to gather and track requirements and issues, and manage costs, as well as communicate out roadmaps.
- Migrated Red Hat Intranet off Jive to Igloo platform: 3 vendor project coordination; hired and managed team to perform migration off Jive platform; saved company $500,000/year; project completed on time with very aggressive schedule; helped create a business owner process for IT assets.
- Upgraded Alfresco Content Services version 5.2 → 7.2; hired and managed team working with the vendor to upgrade dozens of applications without downtime or disruption saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly support costs.
- Created hiring plans and prioritization processes for extended teams and restructured the compensation/proficiency model to align with other developers in the organization.
Software Engineering Manager, Westford, MA Feb 2015 - Oct 2019
Grew my "20% project" to a full Document Management System for sales and marketing assets
- Created processes to ensure a stable, consistent, fast, and always up to date internal resource for sales and branding materials enabling Red Hat to reach $3.4 Billion in yearly sales.
- Remotely managed a team of PHP and Java developers, data analysts, and UX/UI, and corporate librarians working from Czech Republic offices with 3 week sprints.
- Created and promoted the librarian job role inside Red Hat that organized and managed efficient content management processes.
Senior Software Engineer, Westford, MA May 2011 - Feb 2015
- Created the Sales and Marketing Documents portal with a custom front end and backed by Alfresco Content Services by working with Product Marketing and Corporate Communications to unify 3-4 business unit managed internal web sites under a single official internal content managed website.
- Guide project re-theming Red Hat Customer Portal (access.redhat.com) to match redhat.com style with over 100 source code repositories; released on schedule.
- Advised the People Team as the only independent contributor on the Health Care Advisory Committee to improve health plans for Northeast-based employees.
Technical Program Manager, Westford, MA Feb 2006 - May 2011
- Built Red Hat’s internal product development tracking portal (Design or deploy tools for tracking and reporting product planning, development, and launch).
- Consistently achieved efficient product releases by managing schedules, guiding planning processes, and reporting on product status with the executive team.
NOVELL, INC. (Provo, UT) 2003 - 2005
Project Manager for the Novell Linux Desktop, Cambridge, MA
Lead Researcher for the Product Design Team, Cambridge, MA
XIMIAN, INC. / HELIX CODE, INC. (Boston, MA) 2000 - 2005
Head of Technical Support, Boston, MA
Head of the Security Response Team, Boston, MA
Business Development, Cambridge, MA
Manager of Desktop Services, Cambridge, MA
CYBERSITES, INC. (New York, NY) 1995 - 2000
Head of Research and Development, New York, NY
Senior Application Developer -- Web Division, New York, NY
Key Strength Areas
Team Management
Budgeting, mentorship, career development, problem solving for development, QA, UX, business analyst, data analysis, content management roles
Programming
Python (10+ years), SQL (10+ years), shell / awk (10+ years), PHP (10+ years), C/C++ (10+ years)
Web Technologies
HTML/CSS (10+ years), Javascript (10+ years)
Administration
Linux (RedHat/Fedora), Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LibreOffice, Git
Education
Columbia University, New York, NY
- Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Spring 1998