Ben Calabrese
Senior Software Engineer
Profile
About
Hi, I'm Ben: a seasoned software engineer with experience leading massive scale web applications that power both enterprise and commercial products.
For the past two years I've led the YouTube Kids Living Room team — delivering a kids tailored experience on smart TVs to millions of families. Prior to that, I spent time at Google building and leading frontend projects in Greentea, the CRM that underlies Google's sales team.
In addition to tackling the most technically challenging problems on my projects, I'm a reliable leader: mentoring teammates, guiding architecture, and reviewing code.
Since joining Google, I've:
- Designed and built architecture used by web applications across YouTube
- Owned the configuration language that powers every chart and table in Google Ads and Greentea
- Established myself as a leader in code health across Google, writing best practices on testing and reviewing readability of code for > 200 engineers
Projects I lead are consumer quality, on-time, comprehensively tested, and ready for new features.
I'm always gearing up for my next challenge.
Skills
-
TypeScript
React -
JavaScript
CSS -
CI/CD
Testing -
TV Dev
HTML -
Dart
Sass -
Git
SQL -
Ruby
Rails -
Python
AWS
Education
App Academy
May 2016
1000 hour-coding school with <5% acceptance rate
Coursework includes: Rails, TDD, OOP, single-page apps, coding style, scalability, algorithms, best practices
S.F. State University
B.A. Drama, May 2013 Summa Cum Laude
Experience
Dropbox
Senior Software Engineer Sept. 2021–Present
- Led org's UX quality team, founding it's core component library, establishing audit/testing strategies, and driving innovation of high polish UX
- Engaged in research and experimentation on behalf of company's president, resulting in grant of 4 patents (with 3 more pending)
- Fostered world class FE development at Dropbox as member of JS Guild Summit planning committee and sole engineer on group of 23 DIG Champions (Dropbox's design system)
- Founding engineer of the Dropbox Design Strategy team, defining 3–5 year company goals adopted by the CEO and board
YouTube
Senior Software Engineer July 2019–Sept. 2021
- Tech lead of the YouTube Kids smart TV app, setting its technical direction, collaborating with PM/UX, and mentoring more junior engineers
- Expanded reach by millions of DAUs, including launches on Apple TV, Fire TV, and Virgin Media
- Drove cross-YouTube projects such as supporting Lottie animations on living room devices
- Shepherded Google wide code health as author of best practices on screenshot testing and as one of ~40 engineers on the Dart readability team
Software Engineer Sept. 2016–July 2019
- Led frontend development on key aspects of Connect Sales, Google's custom CRM, including integration with the support ticket system
- Co-owner of custom configuration language used to power all tables, forms, and charts in Google Ads and Connect Sales
