Resume
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.
Washington, DC ben@balter.com
Also available on LinkedIn and GitHub. Download as PDF, Word, or Markdown.
Areas of focus
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—PresentOpen & Async - The collaborative software development playbook for remote and distributed teams.
- Writing - Authored Open & Async, 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 2026Drove 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 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 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.
- 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.
Executive Office of the President
Presidential Innovation Fellow
September 2011—January 2013- As a member of the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows, 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, and built the first-of-its-kind mechanism 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 — 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 2015
- Why you should work asynchronously 2022
- Why open source: 25 reasons to embrace it 2015
- Leaders show their work 2022
- Manage like an engineer 2023
- Meetings are a point of escalation, not a starting point 2023
- Cathedral vs Bazaar People Management 2023
- Transparent collaboration is the andon of knowledge work 2023
- Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently 2023