Senior Software Engineer / Platform Engineer

Ben Huffine

Generalist senior engineer focused on platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and AI systems. Building resilient platforms and tools that enable teams to ship confidently.

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Chattanooga, TN Open to senior generalist roles: platform, backend, and product-adjacent systems
Portrait of Ben Huffine

Summary

Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience as a generalist who gravitates toward ambiguous, high-impact problems. I've built and operated production systems across product, platform, and infrastructure domains, learning new technologies and domains as needed to solve what's in front of the team.

In recent years, I've focused on platform engineering and cloud infrastructure because that's where I could have the most leverage: building internal developer tooling, improving reliability and observability, and delivering applied AI systems using retrieval-augmented generation. I care deeply about leaving behind systems that are understandable, operable, and resilient in production.

Focus Areas

Project Highlights

These projects reflect the kinds of under-defined, cross-cutting problems I tend to take on, often at the intersection of product needs, platform capabilities, and operational reality.

AI Enablement Platform

Designed shared infrastructure and APIs to enable multiple AI product efforts across a cloud-native platform, reducing duplicated effort and accelerating experimentation.

  • Delivered a common API layer to standardize model access and governance.
  • Implemented RAG foundations to align responses with internal data.
  • Enabled rapid prototyping with reusable patterns and deployment tooling.

AWS Bedrock, ECS, Python, Django

Cloud Operations Console

Built internal tooling to manage AWS resources, deployments, and operational workflows, improving visibility and reducing manual operational overhead.

  • Automated infrastructure changes with auditable, repeatable pipelines.
  • Reduced manual toil by centralizing service configuration.
  • Improved reliability with visibility into environment health and events.

AWS CDK, CloudFormation, PostgreSQL

Internationalization Tooling

Built translation workflows for a large curriculum platform transitioning to a modern SPA, enabling faster global rollout while preserving content integrity.

  • Created a side-by-side translation interface for machine-assisted review.
  • Streamlined content localization while preserving layout intent.
  • Supported global rollouts with a scalable, versioned pipeline.

React, Node.js, Classic ASP, SQL Server

Experience

Platform Engineer, Ambition

2020–2025
  • Designed and operated a Python/Django control plane for AWS infrastructure management and product release deployments across hundreds of client ECS environments.
  • Built an event-driven system that ingested AWS events as the single source of truth, enabling automated responses to infrastructure events including spot instance interruptions and automatic ECS service redeployment across capacity providers.
  • Designed and implemented a PostgreSQL proxy providing audited, sanitized developer access to client production data, balancing operational transparency with security and compliance requirements.
  • Owned end-to-end AWS infrastructure across ECS, RDS, S3, VPC, CloudWatch, and related services, ensuring scalability, security, and reliability across hundreds of client environments.
  • Designed and implemented RAG pipelines using AWS Bedrock, vectorizing internal data to provide contextual grounding for LLM outputs across multiple products.
  • Led operational support and incident response initiatives, improving system observability through structured logging, metrics, and alerting across production services.
  • Managed shared Docker image dependencies and core software version upgrades across a Python/Django monorepo, supporting both the product platform and internal control plane.

Senior Software Engineer, ACT

2013–2020
  • Led modernization of a legacy Flash-based learning platform into a responsive Single Page Application supporting large-scale curriculum delivery.
  • Built backend and frontend features supporting internationalization, including a side-by-side machine and human translation workflow.
  • Built Kafka connectors and transformers for production data pipelines across multiple platforms.
  • Worked across a diverse technology stack including Python, React, PostgreSQL, Java, Kafka, Node.js, and SQL Server.
  • Collaborated cross-functionally to deliver reliable, tested software for enterprise-scale users.

Earlier Career Experience

  • Freelance Software Engineer — web, mobile, and data systems for diverse clients
  • Senior Programmer, Coptix/Medium — custom software across Django, Rails, and SQL
  • Operations Tech Analyst II, UnumProvident — internal tooling and automation

Skills

Languages

Python, JavaScript, Java, Objective-C, PHP, Ruby

Frameworks

Django, React, Node.js, Ruby on Rails

Cloud

AWS ECS, RDS, S3, VPC, CloudWatch, Bedrock, CloudFormation

Data

PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, ElastiCache, Elasticsearch

DevOps

AWS CDK, Kafka, CI/CD

Education

Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, GA — Information & Computer Sciences and Philosophy (2002)

Contact

For opportunities or collaboration, reach out via email or LinkedIn.

[email protected] Download Resume