Ben Lovell

an svg stylized greyscale image of me, the author

Experience


Tower

Senior Software Engineer
Berlin, Germany
June 2025 – 

Contributed to CLI tooling, backend infrastructure, and developer experience for Tower's serverless Python platform. Core contributor across the Rust CLI, Go/Rust/TypeScript monorepo, and infrastructure:

  • led, architected and implemented the development of an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server in the Rust CLI, proving critical for adoption
  • improved reactivity and reduced backend load & frontend data consumption by introducing a shoulder tap SSE/fetch system
  • designed and built the Organizations multi-tenancy system end-to-end, including database migrations, API changes, and billing integration
  • migrated infrastructure provisioning to Terraform/OpenTofu, including EKS dataplane, AWS SSO user management, and observability pipelines
  • parallelized Go test suite with isolated databases, reducing test runs from ~1m30s to ~5s, and eliminating flaky tests

Self Employment

Freelancer & Open Source
Berlin, Germany
September 2024 – June 2025

Took time between roles for contract work and open source contributions.

  • helped designed and implement a dependency injection framework in Rust for a client
  • contributed packages to NixOS
  • worked on some small projects for a Clojure TUI, incident response management, clojure.berlin

Pitch Software GmbH

Senior Software Engineer
Berlin, Germany
January 2019 – April 2024

Contributed to the development of Pitch's backend and frontend systems, working over 4 different product areas and ending up specializing in the offline-first sync system. Some of the stuff I worked on:

  • introduced a reproducible development environment and tooling, improving workflows and productivity across engineering team using a combination of nix, docker, bash and Python
  • led a cross-team documentation working group, making technical onboarding smoother and improving internal knowledge sharing
  • took initiative to fix many frontend (CLJS/React) and backend (CLJ/Postgres) problems, gaining buy-in from leadership with cost/benefit analyses
  • designed and implemented improvements to the core sync system to address data loss and developer productivity issues in the offline first functionality, working with senior leadership on a long-term roadmap
  • mentored junior engineers, guiding them through their first feature implementations and fostering technical growth

Geeny/Telefonicá Next GmbH

Backend Data Engineer
Berlin, Germany
March 2017 – December 2019

Hired as part of the full time expansion of the Geeny IoT Cloud platform from Telefonicá Next GmbH, in order to build a data privacy first IoT solution I've:

  • architected a microservices infrastructure on AWS with Docker, Kafka and HTTP/JSON
  • analysed and translated product requirements into technical implementations
  • delivered 3 crucial Clojure services under a month-long time constraint
  • led the effort to have a 15-repo continuous integration and deployment process with GitLab CI/CD, reducing the release cycle from weeks to minutes

Red Pineapple Media GmbH

Software Engineer
Berlin, Germany
April 2015 – February 2017

I was brought on to help the urgent rewrite of the video ad delivery system from PHP using a modern Clojure stack. Key role in system design and performance.


lifelife UG

Full Stack Developer
Berlin, Germany
November 2014 – April 2015

Created a decoupled separate service to interact with the main Rails application. Implemented funnel metrics, multiple locale support, and more.


Skyscanner Ltd

Intern at Change the Market (R&D)
Edinburgh, UK
June 2013 – August 2013

Built a better R&D frontend interface by writing a small DSL & parser (in JavaScript).


University of St Andrews

Research Intern
June 2012 – July 2012

Created a population simulation tool for demographic and graph db testing.


Outside Responsibilities

Clojure Berlin Meetup

Co-Organizer
Berlin, Germany
October 2016 – Present

Part of a small team taking turns to MC, filling in for lack of speakers, and keeping our 900 member meetup connected


ClojureBridge Berlin

Orga Team Member and Coach
Summer 2015 – Summer 2017

Conducted outreach, triaged attendee invitations, organized catering, etc.


Education

University of St Andrews

2.1, BSc (Hons) in Computer Science
St Andrews, UK
2010 – 2014

Heavy practical education with subjects including:
Data Encoding, Artificial Intelligence, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Knowledge Discovery and Datamining, Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)