# Ben Balter Washington, DC · [ben@balter.com](mailto:ben@balter.com) · [ben.balter.com](https://ben.balter.com) · [github.com/benbalter](https://github.com/benbalter) · [linkedin.com/in/benbalter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/benbalter) ## Summary Engineering leader who scales the operations, culture, and people functions behind high-performing teams. At GitHub, cut friction and time-to-productivity through reimagined onboarding, AI-driven automation, and rigorous business rhythms. A decade-plus track record shipping at the intersection of product, policy, and open source, from the White House to the world's largest software development platform. ## Skills **Leadership** - Engineering leadership - Organizational design - Chief-of-staff operating patterns - Executive communication - Change management **Program and product** - Technical program management - Strategic planning and OKRs - Product management - Internal platforms - Async-first collaboration **Technology and policy** - Open source strategy - Privacy, security, and compliance - Public sector and government technology - Technology law and licensing - Developer experience ## Experience ### Open & Async, LLC. #### Founder & Author _May 2026 – Present_ [Open & Async](https://open-and-async.com/?utm_source=benbalter-resume) - The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams. - **Writing** - Authored [*Open & Async*](https://open-and-async.com/?utm_source=benbalter-resume), a practical playbook drawn from a decade of remote-first work at GitHub that teaches distributed teams to work in the open, default to async, and measure impact over input rather than hours logged. - **Topics** - Covered documentation as a productivity multiplier, meetings as escalations rather than defaults, decision-making with durable written context, change management for async adoption, team health, and AI in async-first teams — written for engineering leaders, managers, and individual contributors at distributed and remote-first organizations. ### GitHub #### Director of Hubber (Employee) Enablement, Office of the COO _July 2024 – July 2026_ Drove the Hubber experience to reduce friction and time-to-productivity, increase engagement, and enable all Hubbers (GitHub employees) to do their best remote work. - **Onboarding** - Reimagined company-wide onboarding to reach 100% semi-async coverage, a 96% Week 1 experience score, and an 82% information score for new hires. - **Learning and development** - Built tool and skill fluency across the organization through a continuous learning framework that reaches the majority of employees each month at an average session rating of 4.75/5.0. - **Internal communications platform** - Overhauled the company's internal knowledge platform to 96% durable content ownership, cut deploy times from over an hour to under 10 minutes, and shipped a WYSIWYG editor that lets non-technical teams self-serve. - **Internal events** - Drove 80% unique live attendance at company-wide events (against a 50% target), lifted employee alignment scores to an 18-month high, and produced Universe Extended sessions that reached 660 attendees with a 4.5/5.0 satisfaction rating. - **AI-driven productivity** - Shipped 700+ pull requests with GitHub Copilot, adding the delivery capacity of an additional engineer and accelerating automation, accessibility improvements, and platform enhancements across internal tools. #### Director of Engineering Operations and Culture _February 2023 – July 2024_ - **Technical business operations** - Established and led a team of seven "Mini Chiefs of Staff" — business technologists supporting Engineering executives to improve department-level and org-wide operations through internal communication, data-driven decision-making, escalation-based initiative management, and strategic planning. - **Operational excellence** - Reduced administrative friction and improved the overall Hubber experience by streamlining the processes and systems behind vendor and budget management, workforce planning, and business operations across the entire Engineering organization. - **Communication** - Designed and implemented [organizational async communication patterns](https://github.blog/2023-10-04-how-to-communicate-like-a-github-engineer-our-principles-practices-and-tools/) that improved information discoverability for globally distributed teams, using AI to increase signal-to-noise for developers while limiting disruption through empathetic change management. - **Automation** - Cut friction across Engineering by championing automation and building a suite of tools for internal communications, weekly reporting, headcount tracking, rhythm of business, and cultural touchstones. #### Chief of Staff, Security _July 2021 – February 2023_ - **Office of the CSO** - Established, documented, and matured repeatable "rhythm of the business" processes for critical business functions, ensuring smooth organizational operations while managing internal, external, and executive communications. - **Portfolio management** - Managed the Chief Security Officer's portfolio of responsibilities through coordination and facilitation of in-flight efforts, and identified, analyzed, and mitigated ongoing program risk. - **Strategy and culture** - Shaped the organization's vision, long-term plans, OKRs, and strategic documents; guided leaders in carrying out strategic intent; and established and socialized organizational culture, values, and behavioral expectations. - **Strategic advisory** - Served as strategic advisor and counsel to the Chief Security Officer, delivering data-driven recommendations that drove execution, and represented the CSO in cross-functional leadership forums. #### Staff Technical Program Manager, Enterprise and Compliance _January 2021 – July 2021_ - 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. - Strengthened customer privacy by removing third-party analytics cookies from all GitHub-owned domains, eliminating non-essential cookie-consent banners. #### Senior Product Manager, Trust and Safety _February 2016 – January 2021_ - 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). - Established the Open Source Customer Advisory Board and piloted an Associate Product Management program with a defined promotional path to Product Manager, shaping GitHub's product culture. #### Government Evangelist _March 2013 – February 2016_ - Led [outreach](https://government.github.com/) 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](http://fedscoop.com/top-federal-it-and-tech-folks-under-40/) and FedScoop's Fed50 [Disruptor of the Year](http://fedscoop.com/fedscoop-50-celebrating-2014s-leaders-federal/). - Led a [bottom-up rewrite of GitHub Pages](https://github.com/blog/1992-eight-lessons-learned-hacking-on-github-pages-for-six-months) (1M+ sites, 250,000+ pages/minute) and shipped [GeoJSON rendering and diffing](https://github.com/blog/1541-geojson-rendering-improvements), enabling 500,000+ public geospatial datasets. - Launched [choosealicense.com](http://choosealicense.com) and a [license-detection API](https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com) to demystify and verify open-source licensing across GitHub. - Secured GitHub's first government reseller ([GSA IT Schedule 70](https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/advantage/catalog/product_detail.do?gsin=11000048085068)) and FedRAMP-compliant availability in [AWS GovCloud](https://enterprise.github.com/aws/gov-cloud), and set the company's export-control (ITAR/EAR) and OFAC compliance policy. ### Executive Office of the President #### Presidential Innovation Fellow _September 2011 – January 2013_ - As a member of the inaugural class of [Presidential Innovation Fellows](https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows), served as entrepreneur-in-residence reimagining the role of technology between citizens and government — 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". - Shipped four distinct open-source products from conception to production within six months, using then-atypical API-first architecture. - Drafted and drove the release of [the President's Digital Government Strategy](http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government.html), and built the [first-of-its-kind mechanism](https://github.com/GSA/digital-strategy) for agencies to report progress against it. - On the White House's first-ever agile team, led development of a government-wide, open-source property-sharing system delivering over $300 million in realized and $2.5 billion in projected savings. ### Federal Communications Commission #### New Media Fellow, Office of the Managing Director _May 2010 – January 2012_ - Received the agency's Superior Achievement Award for customer service, quality, and overall contribution to the mission. - Built 30+ in-house, open-source tools — including [site auditing and mapping software](http://github.com/fcc) — to evaluate a web presence spanning 1.2 million+ pages, and drafted the privacy, comment-moderation, and API-terms policies behind the agency's reimagined web presence. ## Selected writing - [Why everything should have a URL](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/12/why-urls/) (2015) - [Why you should work asynchronously](https://ben.balter.com/2022/03/17/why-async/) (2022) - [Why open source: 25 reasons to embrace it](https://ben.balter.com/2015/11/23/why-open-source/) (2015) - [Leaders show their work](https://ben.balter.com/2022/02/16/leaders-show-their-work/) (2022) - [Manage like an engineer](https://ben.balter.com/2023/01/10/manage-like-an-engineer/) (2023) - [Meetings are a point of escalation, not a starting point](https://ben.balter.com/2023/04/20/meetings-are-a-point-of-escalation/) (2023) - [Cathedral vs Bazaar People Management](https://ben.balter.com/2023/12/08/cathedral-bazaar-management/) (2023) - [Transparent collaboration is the andon of knowledge work](https://ben.balter.com/2023/08/30/transparency-collaboration-is-the-andon-of-knowledge-production/) (2023) - [Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently](https://ben.balter.com/2023/08/04/remote-work-communicate-more-with-less/) (2023) ## Education ### The George Washington University Law School Juris Doctor · _May 2013_ ### The George Washington University School of Business Master of Business Administration — Strategic Management and Public Policy · _May 2013_ ### The George Washington University Bachelor of Arts, Political Science · _May 2009_ ## Certifications ### Professional - **Bar Association of the District of Columbia** — Member, license 1021576 - **International Information System Security Certification Consortium (ISC)²** — [Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)](https://www.credly.com/badges/1a8b31f1-3727-4acf-a6a8-8d67af9ecb23) _(Expired)_ ### Personal interests - **Federal Communications Commission** — Amateur Radio Technician Class License, callsign KO6EYB - **Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET)** — Level 3 (Advanced) Award in Wines - **Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI)** — Open water diver