Benjamin Ross

About

AWS-focused backend/data engineer with hands-on production experience building serverless APIs (Lambda/API Gateway) secured with Cognito/JWT, deploying via Terraform + CI/CD, and managing secrets with Secrets Manager/Parameter Store. Also built AWS Glue ETL from S3 to RDS with schema evolution and data-quality controls, modernized a monolith into microservices using parallel testing, and delivered major SQL performance gains (minutes to seconds) while owning incident response for batch pipelines.

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Built production serverless backends on AWS (Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB/RDS/S3)
• Implemented auth and API security using AWS Cognito and JWT
• Reliability engineering: retries (incl. exponential backoff), timeouts, and structured error handling with monitoring/alerts
• IaC and CI/CD delivery using Terraform with AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions
• Secrets/config management using AWS Secrets Manager and Parameter Store
• ETL pipeline development with AWS Glue (crawlers for schema evolution, data validation, skipping malformed records)
• Modernized monolith to microservices with parallel run/testing and stakeholder sign-off process
• SQL performance tuning with measurable impact (reduced query runtime from minutes to seconds)
• Owned and resolved batch/data pipeline incident (schema change), improved validation and alerting to prevent recurrence
• Cost/scaling controls in serverless (CloudWatch monitoring, concurrency controls, cost anomaly alarms)