Benjamin Young - Professional

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Completed MS project in Human-Computer Interaction lab under the supervision of Dr. Erin Walker. Created a chatbot that runs on a physical robot used to teach middle school students how to program. Project included the development of a chatbot, the programming of the physical robot platform, and significant modifications to a web application.
GPA: 4.0

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
December 2021

Graduated Magna Cum Laude
University of Pittsburgh Honor's College Member
TA for Computer Organization and Assembly Language
- Led a recitation section consisting of ~15 students. Reviewed class material with the students and ensured they were well-prepared for assignments.
- Held weekly office hours to assist students in their understanding of the material.
Research Assistant in a Human-Computer Interaction Lab
- Kept up to date on relevant literature and analyzed how it applied to the lab's work.
- Implemented prototypes of systems designed in the lab.
President of Sports Analysis Club at Pitt
- Led discussion on a wide variety of professional and collegiate sports in meetings consisting of 20+ members
- Ensured that the club was compliant with University regulations governing usages of funds, University trademarks, and club activities

Member of Agile team responsible for the compiler, runtime, and standard library of the Apex programming language, which is responsible for the success of hundreds of thousands of customers and processes over 100 billion transactions monthly
Implemented new assertion methods into the Apex standard library. The assertions include checks for null values and for type equality. These methods will make Apex code much easier to test, thus greatly improving the customer experience. Project was completed, including stretch goals, well ahead of schedule, allowing me to work on tasks normally assigned to new hires.
Improved the logging capabilities of the Apex compiler, thus making it easier for support engineers to diagnose and solve customer issues. Implemented a solution to a problem with bytecode generation in the Apex compiler, fixing an issue with direct customer impact.
Determined that long-outstanding bugs with Apex could not be solved efficiently and proved this to be the case, thereby saving future development time on items where no high-quality solution exists.

Member of Agile DevOps team responsible for managing infrastructure that sends 3.2 billion emails per day
Implemented a series of automations to configure email sending software, run smoke tests on configurations, and automatically create change requests. These automations save 10 hours of manual work per week and clean up technical debt
Implemented new CI/CD pipeline to automatically create message transfer agent configurations, manage them via GitHub, test them through the dynamic creation of a Docker container in TeamCity, and deploy the configuration via TeamCity. This replaces a manual process, adding testing, validation, and automatic deployment, as well as increasing the speed at which new configurations can be deployed.
Developed a custom Terraform module that reduces the time needed to deploy a new virtual machine, saving 15 hours weekly. This allows virtual machines to be configured in a simple and version control friendly way, instead of manually configuring each new virtual machine.

Two Full-Time Summer Internships and Four Semesters of Part-Time Internships at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute

Software Engineering Intern, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute
May 2019 - May 2021

Member of Agile full-stack development team responsible for developing web applications to facilitate cybersecurity training and exercises
Developed two custom Terraform providers, allowing cybersecurity exercises and related resources to be created in a way that is simple, programmatic, and efficient. Engineers use these providers to create exercises instead of doing so manually with a GUI.
Added significant functionality to multiple web applications, including webhooks, advanced text searching, and the ability for users to create custom diagrams consisting of images and click points, using Angular and C#.
Led the development of a Java desktop application that consolidates information on the NICE cybersecurity framework, creating a single place where team members can easily query for information, instead of relying on searching through websites

Programming Languages: Java, Python, Go, C#, C, Rust, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, R
Frameworks: Angular, .NET Core, Flask, JUnit, Selenium
Technologies: Terraform, Docker, Jira, Linux, Git, Confluence, PostgreSQL, LaTeX, Chef, Splunk, Monit, TeamCity, Rasa, Perforce
Development Methodologies: Agile Development, Test Driven Development