Benjamin Cable

Senior Software Engineer

Oct 2022 – Present · Remote

Backend engineer on the core Go service, the developer console, and the platform's self-hosted infrastructure.

• Moved the production data store off managed infrastructure onto self-hosted bare-metal MySQL on Hetzner (deliberately outside the cluster) and built the k3s platform around it: deploys, failover, backups and monitoring.
• Designed the cross-platform identity system: platform account linking, conflict authorisation and merge flows with a declarative scenario test harness, later reused as the foundation for publisher-scoped cross-game progressions.
• Platform commerce: catalogues, currencies, wallets, entitlements and real-money IAP across Apple, Google, PlayStation, Steam and Epic, with defensive entitlement recording, refund processing and vendor failure surfacing for self-service debugging.
• Database engineering end-to-end: a code-based, feature-flagged schema migration engine, the GORM→sqlx migration, and InnoDB-level fixes such as eliminating a gap-lock deadlock by inserting before locking.
• Shipped GDPR compliance as engineering: Art. 28 DPA acceptance flows, PII classification on onboarding data, admin audit logging, and bulk player right-to-erasure.
• Migrated auth.game from Next.js to Go server-side rendering, consolidating the auth surface onto the core stack.
• Plus the rest of the platform: game/server/admin APIs, leaderboards, Redis-backed presence, email campaigns, the Next.js developer console, a Go + templ + HTMX publisher analytics platform, and internal libraries like go-filestorage and mysql-retry.

Staff Software Engineer

Nov 2021 – Oct 2022 · Southampton, UK

Focused on improving the tech stack and service efficiency.

• Created internal libraries to assist moving the company's systems to Go.
• Defined and refined the process for re-architecting services in Go.
• Introduced Prometheus metrics to the Go services.
• Built an asset optimisation pipeline to make file uploads faster and more efficient.

Engineering Team Lead

Jan 2021 – Oct 2021 · London, UK

Built the Digital Experience team from the ground up.

• Defined process, audited the team's entire codebase, produced architecture diagrams and targeted strategic improvements.
• Drove the replacement of the customer portal PHP monolith with a micro-frontend application powered by React and GraphQL.
• Quality push on customer-facing services reduced call volume and support tickets; the UW app went from 2.1 to 4.5 stars on the App Store.
• 1:1s, mentoring and the usual management aspects of the role.

Senior Software Engineer

Aug 2020 – Jan 2021 · London, UK

Part of the digital experience team.

• Improved usability and security of the login system via trusted third-party identity providers and 2FA support.
• Helped define and establish better documentation practices.

Technical Architect

Oct 2019 – Jul 2020 · Poole, UK

Principal Engineer duties minus the people management, stepping back to focus on the tech as an individual contributor.

Principal Engineer

Nov 2018 – Oct 2019 · Poole, UK

Shared leadership of a 30-strong team alongside another Principal Engineer.

• Spearheaded the technical design of the Lush Pay tills back-end and oversaw its deployment across the UK, Italy and Japan.
• Designed and architected technical projects; introduced standardised methods of handling data across the business.
• Kept the usual 1:1s, reviews, holiday & pay management and mentorship, plus hands-on backend engineering.

Senior Software Engineer

Jul 2017 – Nov 2018 · Bournemouth, UK

Go & PHP microservices as part of the SOA team and commerce squad.

• Mentoring and support for new Gophers.
• Development and maintenance of open-source software including LUSHDigital/core, LUSHDigital/modelgen and ladydascalie/v.

PHP Developer

Apr 2016 – Jul 2017 · Bournemouth, UK

API & backend work as part of the server team.

• Worked on the Emergencies app suite, chained-crowdsourcing and the ATLAS preparedness backend.
• AWS services ranging from RDS to DynamoDB, SQS, SES and SNS.