Ben Balter: Resume

Product owner for GitHub’s internal employee platform: the knowledge base, onboarding, and enablement tooling 4,000+ Hubbers use to get work done. Led a team of six across product, engineering, and content.

• Platform product ownership: Owned the roadmap for the company’s internal knowledge platform, driving durable content ownership to 96%, cutting deploy times from over an hour to under 10 minutes, and shipping a WYSIWYG editor that moved non-technical teams off filing tickets and onto self-serve publishing.
• Shipped as a builder: Merged 700+ pull requests with GitHub Copilot, adding the delivery capacity of an additional engineer and accelerating automation, accessibility, and platform work across internal tools.
• Incident communications: Owned internal communications and stakeholder status updates during active incidents.
• Onboarding as a product: Rebuilt company-wide onboarding to 100% semi-async coverage, and ran a continuous learning program that reaches the majority of employees every month.

• Team leadership: Built and led a team of seven business technologists supporting Engineering executives, improving department-level and org-wide operations through internal communication, data-driven decision-making, escalation-based initiative management, and workforce planning.
• Communication: Designed and implemented organizational async communication patterns that improved information discoverability for globally distributed teams, using AI to increase signal-to-noise for developers while limiting disruption through empathetic change management.
• Internal tooling: Cut friction across Engineering by championing automation and shipping a suite of tools for internal communications, weekly reporting, headcount tracking, rhythm of business, and cultural touchstones.

• Directly involved in the majority of Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) incidents, coordinating across teams and driving escalations.
• Strategic advisor and counsel to the Chief Security Officer: shaped the organization’s vision, OKRs, and long-term plans, and represented the CSO in cross-functional leadership forums.

• Led organization-wide business readiness for GitHub AE, GitHub’s managed enterprise SaaS offering, ahead of general availability for customers in high-compliance industries.
• As a founding member of GitHub’s Technical Program Management organization, managed business functions across GitHub Enterprise Server releases and built a weekly program-reporting process, adopted org-wide, to communicate status, risks, and mitigations to executives.

• Led community, safety, privacy, product security, and platform health for a software development platform with 50M+ customers and 100M+ projects.
• Shipped 500+ staff- and user-facing features and policies across trust and safety (Community Guidelines, DMCA and abuse reporting, PhotoDNA detection), account security (phishing-resistant 2FA, role-based access controls), and privacy and compliance (third-party analytics removal, data portability, IP ownership).
• Wrote and shipped github.com API endpoints powering trust, safety, and platform-health workflows for tens of millions of developers.
• Piloted an Associate Product Management program with a defined promotional path to Product Manager, building the pipeline that shaped GitHub’s product culture.
• Established the Open Source Customer Advisory Board, creating a standing discovery channel between the platform’s largest maintainer communities and the product organization.

• Led outreach for GitHub’s government program, driving open-source, open-data, and open-government adoption across nearly 2,000 government organizations in 75+ countries and 8–10x growth in government users, organizations, and revenue. Named one of the top 25 most influential people in government and technology and FedScoop’s Fed50 Disruptor of the Year.
• Led a bottom-up rewrite of GitHub Pages (1M+ sites, 250,000+ pages/minute) and shipped GeoJSON rendering and diffing, enabling 500,000+ public geospatial datasets.
• Held direct operational ownership of GitHub Pages in production, serving as incident commander during overnight incidents.
• Launched choosealicense.com and a license-detection API to demystify and verify open-source licensing across GitHub.
• Secured GitHub’s first government reseller (GSA IT Schedule 70) and FedRAMP-compliant availability in AWS GovCloud, and set the company’s export-control (ITAR/EAR) and OFAC compliance policy.

• As a member of the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, shipped four open-source products from conception to production in six months using then-atypical API-first architecture, including Project MyGov, a citizen-centric prototype that let people use a single profile across federal agency sites instead of a separate account for each. The single-account model it prototyped later shipped government-wide as login.gov.
• Described by the US Chief Technology Officer as “the baddest of the badass innovators” and by the White House Director of Digital Strategy as “lightning in a bottle”.

• Drafted and drove the release of the President’s Digital Government Strategy, and built the first-of-its-kind mechanism for agencies to report progress against it.

• On the White House’s first-ever agile team, and in close coordination with the Office of Federal Financial Management, led development of a prototype government-wide, open-source property-sharing system, delivering over $300 million in realized savings.

• Helped relaunch FCC.gov, the agency’s public web presence, and built 30+ in-house, open-source tools, including site auditing and mapping software, to evaluate and consolidate a legacy footprint of 1.2 million+ pages. Received the agency’s Superior Achievement Award.
• Handled the legal questions a federal agency runs into when it moves online: cookies, third-party analytics, and using social media to collect public comment. Drafted the site privacy policy, comment-moderation policy, third-party privacy notices, and API terms of service, and built the legal and technical roadmaps for compliance with OMB memoranda M-10–22 and M-10–23.