Ben Abbitt
Senior Solution Architect at Slalom. Deep, varied experience across cloud infrastructure, software engineering, and AI / LLM / prompt engineering. I look at problems and design systems to solve them from first principles.
2020 — present Cloud · AI · software architecture
Senior Solution Architect
· Slalom Consulting
notable engagements ↓
↳ Customer & Billing Management
Solution Architect / Technical Lead — Agriculture
- Architected and led a team to implement an asynchronous customer & billing management system, replacing two prior attempts that were failing due to unacceptable performance.
- Solution exceeded requirements by an order of magnitude — 3s end-to-end update time vs a 30s requirement.
↳ Tax preparation software back-end
Solution Architect — Tax
- Architected a data migration for a tax-preparation software company that will result in net savings of greater than $1M USD / yr in direct licensing costs, plus significant reduction in operating expense.
↳ Single-pane-of-glass CRM
Solution Architect — Insurance
- Architected and managed a team to implement a custom CRM to present insurance sales associates a unified dashboard of their actionable items.
- Changed architectures with minimal disruption of ongoing work during the project, in response to changing business requirements.
↳ IoT data management & processing engine
Solution Architect — Heavy Equipment Manufacturing
- Performed latency and performance analysis across a myriad of Amazon Web Services products, culminating in a change of direction of the organization toward a novel data storage architecture.
- Performance analysis uncovered new-to-AWS defects in released services.
2017 — 2020 Architecture · rescue work
Application / Cloud / DevOps Architect
· Pariveda Solutions
- Built a vertical-slice generator (microservice + frontend) — slice setup from weeks to minutes.
- Containerized a 20-year-old tax-prep app suite — dev setup from a week+ to hours.
- Rescued a two-months-late online-ordering app; re-architected off a global mutable store, shipped on time.
2014 — 2017 Troubleshooting · velocity · devops
Software Craftsman
· Pariveda Solutions
- Shipped a checksum-based defense against URL manipulation in a banking app in under six hours.
- Cut mobile-app production builds from multi-hour to single-digit minutes.
- Parachuted into teams for weeks-to-months as architectural + devops troubleshooter.
2011 — 2014 Forensic engineering · Android · TDD
Software Craftsman
· American Airlines
- Reassembled a ~50k-line app from decompiled binaries + scraps of unversioned code after a server failure.
- Android SME on a committee measuring vendor-change risk to in-flight entertainment.
- Taught TDD to AA.com developers.
Skills
- Polyglot dev
- Rust · Go (Golang) · Python · Java · Kotlin
- IaC
- Hashicorp Terraform / OpenTofu · Docker · Kubernetes · Helm · Podman
- CI/CD
- Jenkins · Cloudbuild · GitHub Workflows
- FOSS I ship
- Context Loom (ctxloom.dev) · Angzarr (angzarr.io)
Certifications
- Google Cloud Platform — Cloud DevOps Engineer · Professional · AI Leader
- Amazon Web Services — Certified DevOps Engineer · Professional · Architect · Professional (historical)