
Skilled in architecture, high level and detailed design, and implementation of big data, high transaction frequency, always-on SaaS and internal systems, business or consumer-facing, from concept through finished product, from user experience through data persistence.
After being VP of Engineering at six successful companies, I wanted to get closer again to hands-on development. I got closer with stints as a director and a senior director at two Fortune 500 companies, but really got re-grounded by working again as a full-stack developer. Presently I am looking for a senior leadership role that will blend technical work with product strategy, feature definition, staffing, product roadmaps, internal and external presentations, engineering management, agile product development process, and interdisciplinary team relationships and efficiency. I am most interested to work in a Node-based environment, and to work for a company that is both commercially successful and doing something of direct value for people. This puts health, education, humanities, and social concerns at the top of my list, but I also remain drawn to things which are simply so cutting edge that they are intellectually fascinating.
I have worked at startup companies and in established, larger companies, spanning the domains of circuit design automation, compiler technology, secure networking, IT management systems, financial software, enterprise infrastructure, and consumer software. My end users have ranged from individual retail consumers to some of the largest companies in the world. I have led teams as small as a handful, and as large as 125.
Work that I led at General Magic produced something quite similar to Siri, 11 years before Siri. This work was made part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, for Outstanding Achievement in Information Technology, and became the basis of the OnStar virtual assistant from General Motors. When I ran Engineering (and for a time Operations as well) for iPass, we had zero user-visible outages in over four years of providing the largest aggregated, secure, enterprise-grade data network then available. At eBay, I led AI and traditional programming teams turning very low quality data into one of the largest structured product catalogs in the world.
Bennett is a seasoned technical leader with a deep understanding of the workings and
applicability of a broad range of relevant technologies and patterns. During our time together
we played with everything from ML pipelines to graph-based solutions to the more mundane elements
of legacy system support and how to work our way out of it. He has good understanding of managing
change within an organization and a great appreciation for engineering and what makes engineers
happy and effective.
— Ron Knapp, VP & General Manager, eBay Structured Data
Bennett is a thoughtful engineering leader and is skilled at motivating a team to deliver results while using engineering best-practices. As a leader, Bennett:
- Set clear expectations and regularly followed-up with his team on open tasks and issues
- Demonstrated clear decision-making, and set like expectations on other leaders with the goal of having clear direction for his team and the organization
- Provided relevant feedback to myself and others on his team, lending to personal growth.
Bennett demonstrated engineering excellence and technical acumen during design reviews and when triaging production issues. The system designs he proposed worked well at scale and helped to reduce maintenance costs. Bennett set expectations on his team to design services that have a clear purpose, and that aim to eliminate ongoing manual efforts when exposing the services to new verticals or marketplaces. He established standards (e.g the standard contribution format for eBay's product catalog) that improved communication and efficiency across internal teams and simplified the interface of the external API.
Bennett demonstrated innovation and attention to quality. During triage and analysis of site issues with our catalog service database, Bennett set expectations on our core platform team that DB systems are to perform in a predictable fashion without inexplicable spikes of latency, even if the average latency is within SLA. Bennett was also a key contributor to designing a novel and simple ETL system that supports pluggable transformation modules such that the common processing platform can run without the need of a supporting team. Bennett helped to make several strategic decisions that raised efficiency and cut costs company-wide, including a reduction and consolidation of a multi-organization system that obtains and processes seller listing data, and a partnership with core engineering on a novel graph database which has since been released as open-source.
— Jeff Cavano, Chief Architect of Structured Data
Bennett is a great engineering leader. He has a tremendous knowledge of not only technology,
but also building highly efficient and motivated teams. His management and leadership experience,
organization and interpersonal skills make him as effective with partners, customers as with
executive leadership. Bennett always creates development opportunities for his team and his team
feel empowered and trusted. I enjoyed working with Bennett.
— Roman Maslovskis, Director, Applied Research /
Principal Research Scientist
I first met Bennett when I interviewed at eBay. It was the first official interview I did in
many years. When talking to Bennett, he carefully explained the team structure, responsibilities,
and shared with me pros and cons from his own perspective. He was very warm and genuine and the
discussion with him played an important role in my decision to join eBay. Later on, I started
collaborating with the knowledge graph team managed by Bennett. Since eBay is a big company, I
kind of expected some level of red tape because this collaboration is across two big organizations.
To my surprise, Bennett and his team have been very open and transparent from the very beginning.
The focus has always been what can we do to improve user experience. And we jointly laid out a
concrete plan to leverage knowledge graph in eBay Search. Bennett is an awesome collaborator to have.
— Zhe Wu, Distinguished Engineer & Architect
I had the pleasure to work twice with Bennett at two different companies as peers. In both
cases it was a great experience working with him. He is a very experienced engineering
leader who is fully capable leading a strong team of engineers. He has a comprehensive technical
knowledge in multiple domains. He is quick to understand complex design issues and come with
original proposals. I saw Bennett giving clear guidance to his team and motivating them to achieve
their goals no matter how hard it is. Last but not least, he fully understand the software
development life cycle and implements the right balance between process and agility, as appropriate
for the specific company he works for.
— Moti Eliav, Site Manager & Sr Director of Engineering
Bennett is a great partner. As a PM, I love working with engineers who are thinking about the
big picture and Bennett always wants to understand what problem we are trying to solve, not just
take a list of requirements and implement them. Not only does Bennett care deeply about our
customers, he cares deeply about his team and it is shows in how he makes sure that they are set
up for success in their projects.
— Steve Kafka, Director of Product Management
Bennett is one of the few engineering managers I have come across who truly strive to
balance business and customer needs with technical excellence. He takes the time to
understand the problem space asking relevant questions to ensure the solutions are designed to
address them. An ideal partner every product manager looks for.
— Anu Mandalam, Product Manager
Bennett was my direct manager for two years. Bennett is a great engineering leader and I
really enjoyed working with him. As relatively a junior manager myself, I got full support
from Bennett. He enabled me to find my own way to become a better manager for my team.
Bennett willingly shared his vast knowledge and experience which helped me with different
dilemmas. No matter what, I knew that Bennett will back me up despite the fact that we worked
remotely (him being in San Jose and my team located in Israel). I feel that Bennett helped my
personal growth as a manager and I appreciate the time we worked together.
— Avital Mashuta, Manager
I have the pleasure of working closely with Bennett for over 2 years in the Structured
Data group at eBay. He's a seasoned professional, and understands that engineering is a
delicate set of trade-offs between technology, functionality, customers & time to market.
He genuinely cares about the people working for him, as well as the projects at hand. He
always aims to have the right thing done, and works with his teams and other teams outside
our group to make that happen. He is interested in the technical aspects of the projects,
but understands that it's generally not managements job to make technical decisions.
— Simon Fell, VP & Fellow
In addition to working on critical technical assignments, Bennett has been an
invaluable source of information and advice on how to scale AdmissionWise. He has helped
us better define and differentiate our products, target appropriate customers, hire and
train new staff, and create a viable timeline to introduce new products. In a nutshell,
his capacity to map his years of experience in high tech software companies to this
entirely different domain is genuinely impressive. When we discuss an idea either one of
us has introduced, his openness and knowledge contribute to exciting, productive
explorations, and to conclusions the company can implement. I recommend him highly to
any business in search of guidance on strategy, execution, or both, whether tackling
current problems or growing the business.
— Annie Roskin, CEO & President
Bennett was a technical advisor to Systems In Motion in establishing an agile
applications development practice. In this role, he was instrumental in developing the
baseline for the practice, benchmarking it against global services organizations, and
reviewing the current engineering practices at the company. He did a very effective job
and exceeded my expectations.
— Neeraj Gupta, CEO
As a technical advisor to ReReply, Bennett has been instrumental in evaluating
technologists and technology. Early on, when I was searching for technical co-founders
(one of whom became my CTO), Bennett provided straightforward feedback about how they
could be best utilized, and how they would fit in with the company, as we became a
larger organization. At one point, I was considering a merger with someone with a much
stronger technical background. Bennett quickly pointed out flaws (the technology was
closer to an experiment than a product) as well as helping me clearly see if I wanted to
work with the person. While we could tell the mergee was clearly brilliant, it didn't
make sense as a business decision. Bennett's insight helped me get clarity quickly.
Bennett has both strong technical and business sense, and can converse skillfully with
both types of people and organizations. I consider myself very lucky to have had him on
my team.
— Jason Wong, CEO
Bennett has outstanding software architecture understanding. He is able to come with the fast
and simple solutions to complex problems. He is also a great leader, motivates his team and his
people really like working for him. Any organization will benefit from having Bennett.
— Noam Zilberman, Director of DevOps & QA
I found Bennett to be a clear thinker and communicator, with a very pragmatic approach
to solving problems. He deeply understands the scrum/agile approach to software
engineering and is a capable team leader and people manager. As a colleague, Bennett was
a great partner and collaborator.
— Mike Nappi, VP of Engineering
Bennett is a very senior engineering leader with strong technical expertise. He is
analytical, goal oriented, and data driven. Bennett has always been quality conscious,
process oriented, yet pragmatic in balancing the same with the business needs. At
ServiceNow he has built a solid QA team ground up in a very short period of time,
implemented Scrum, and streamlined the development and release processes — significantly
enhancing the quality of the product releases. I would welcome the opportunity to work
with Bennett again.
— Kranthi Ravi, Sr. Director
I was impressed with how fast Bennett was able to take full ownership. Bennett is a
very experienced VP of engineering and this shows in his daily work – quickly
reacting to events, understating the full situation, communicating with customers as
well as employees and taking thoughtful decisions. Bennett is also hard working, very
dedicated and a great person to work with. I would love to work with him again.
— Moti Eliav, VP of Engineering
Bennett is an outstanding Vice President of Engineering who excels at building and
managing high performance teams to deliver scalable software products and solutions. He
is not only an excellent technologist, but understands the business needs and has always
been a great bridge between engineering and business. He is a great manager, skilled in
managing distributed teams and leads his teams from the front, taking ownership to
ensure schedules are met. He will be a valuable asset to any organization he joins.
—
Shailesh Nivsarkar, VP of Business Development
Bennett is a sensational leader, thinker and person. Bennett came to Yodlee and helped
us mature as an organization by successfully introducing new methodologies while keeping
us productive. Despite overseeing a very large team, Bennett always takes the extra time
to keep his team happy and motivated; always taking the time for one-on-ones with not
only his direct reports, but their reports as well. During this time he is genuine,
inquisitive and provides invaluable feedback. This extra effort means Bennett is always
on top of all of myriad of activities across the organization, and is always able to
manage, lead, design and make the decisions that cause us to succeed. I would work in an
organization led by Bennett any time.
— David Azaria, UI Manager
I highly recommend Bennett as a VP of Engineering, he is a strong manager and leader
for a development organization. He has a deep understanding of the technical side of
product development balanced by awareness of business needs, which is very valuable in
making the tough decisions and trade-offs necessary to deliver product to market. In
addition to his technical abilities, he has a talent for hiring strong candidates and
developing the potential in his team. He and his team are one of the best I have worked
with.
— Mike Ehlers, VP of Product Management
Bennett is one of the best engineering leaders I have worked with. He has a
well-deserved reputation within his team as being a great boss and mentor. He blends
business savvy, great hiring skills, and people management skills that have created a
world-class and highly loyal engineering department. He gets powerful results by
empowering his team, treating them well, and ensuring that they understand the
underlying business problems. He is the real deal when it comes to looking for an
engineering head that can grow and cultivate a team.
—
Theresa Bui Friday, Founder, and VP of Marketing
Bennett is the best VP of Engineering I've worked for. He is able to keep his teams
focused on achieving the objectives needed by the business while maintaining a high
level of morale – even when times are difficult. He is excellent at keeping his
staff lean and high-performing. He is decisive, articulate and a terrific person to work
for.
— Larry Hartsook, Architect
Bennett joined Palamida and orchestrated a re-architecting of the flagship product and
drove the creation of the new vulnerability and workflow solutions that substantially
differentiated the company in the market. He consistently hired good developers and
created a loyal and motivated team environment. Bennett also contributed to the
marketing messages, was great with customers, and provided constructive feedback to the
organization.
— Rick Oswald, VP of Sales
I worked as a peer of Bennett's at iPass where we worked together to deliver solutions
to prospects and customers. Bennett distinguishes himself from others in his role
through a focus on strong methodology while also maintaining understanding of the needs
of other departments and most importantly the customer. He has outstanding customer
facing skills and commands a strong ability to build trust and confidence even in the
most challenging of customer situations. I recommend Bennett for any technology
leadership function requiring a disciplined approach to facilitating results and
knowledgeable and personable interaction with internal and external customers.
— Jim McGuire, VP of Sales
Bennett was a creative and dedicated VP of Engineering for iPass, I enjoyed the personal
interaction, and getting the work done with a focus on quality and timeliness to market
need.
— John Charters, COO
Bennett is a very technically-oriented engineering manager, who knows how to strike the
right balance between delivering on-time and delivering a quality product. I enjoyed
working with Bennett at General Magic, at iPass, and again at eBay.
— Barbara Nelson, CTO
Bennett is an experienced technologist, manager and strategist. At iPass he was able to
take a small engineering team and quickly build it into a solid organization that could
be counted on to deliver multiple client and server releases each year, while keeping
staff turnover low. He has a strong understanding of the balance between offshoring vs.
maintaining control of projects. He also is a strong planner who knows how to work with
a CFO proactively and effectively – a good communicator.
— Don McCauley, CFO
I hired Bennett to lead the ISE Platform Engineering team at Cisco after a long and
very careful search. Bennett clearly stands out as a team player and always tries to
optimize for the needs of the business unit over his own team. His strong communication
skills and diverse background prepare him well for the challenges one faces as an
engineering leader.
— Pramod Badjate, Sr. Director
Bennett is a results oriented VP who gives you the liberty to think out of the box &
be creative in your work. He is very knowledgeable, disciplined & meticulous in his
approach. He is compassionate, always leads from the front & is an excellent mentor.
Given an opportunity I would love to work with him again.
—
Mahendra Gianchandani, Director of Engineering
I reported to Bennett for over two years while working at iPass, and then worked with
him again at Yodlee. Bennett is an excellent leader. He is a creative thinker who works
to ensure his vision and expectations are clear – an important characteristic for
a boss. He is also a great mentor. I learned a lot from Bennett about integrity within
the software development process – quality engineering as a discipline, across all
organizations, not just QA.
— Diana Westnedge, QA Manager
Bennett's leadership and team building skills were instrumental in establishing an
environment of success – although my team and I were located in a remote office,
it never felt that way as Bennett’s guidance was always present. I deeply respect
Bennett's ability to effectively manage highly technical teams and drive productivity. It
was a pleasure working for Bennett and I would enjoy working with him again in the future
should the opportunity arise.
— Alan Hand, Director of Engineering
Bennett joined Comergent during a period of rapid growth. We were trying to make the
leap from early startup to serious player. Bennett immediately grasped the complexities
of the situation and instilled the needed structure and discipline to help make that
transition. He instilled consistency and predictability in our engineering approach and
scheduling. At the same time he was able to make the difficult pragmatic decisions that
are sometimes necessary in a young company. I would gladly work for Bennett again.
— Scott Philips, Manager
Summary
Skilled in architecture, high level and detailed design, and implementation of big data, high transaction frequency, always-on SaaS and internal systems, business or consumer-facing, from concept through finished product, from user experience through data persistence.
After being VP of Engineering at six successful companies, I wanted to get closer again to hands-on development. I got closer with stints as a director and a senior director at two Fortune 500 companies, but really got re-grounded by working again as a full-stack developer. Presently I am looking for a senior leadership role that will blend technical work with product strategy, feature definition, staffing, product roadmaps, internal and external presentations, engineering management, agile product development process, and interdisciplinary team relationships and efficiency. I am most interested to work in a Node-based environment, and to work for a company that is both commercially successful and doing something of direct value for people. This puts health, education, humanities, and social concerns at the top of my list, but I also remain drawn to things which are simply so cutting edge that they are intellectually fascinating.
I have worked at startup companies and in established, larger companies, spanning the domains of circuit design automation, compiler technology, secure networking, IT management systems, financial software, enterprise infrastructure, and consumer software. My end users have ranged from individual retail consumers to some of the largest companies in the world. I have led teams as small as a handful, and as large as 125.
Work that I led at General Magic produced something quite similar to Siri, 11 years before Siri. This work was made part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, for Outstanding Achievement in Information Technology, and became the basis of the OnStar virtual assistant from General Motors. When I ran Engineering (and for a time Operations as well) for iPass, we had zero user-visible outages in over four years of providing the largest aggregated, secure, enterprise-grade data network then available. At eBay, I led AI and traditional programming teams turning very low quality data into one of the largest structured product catalogs in the world.
Experience
Admissionwise Consulting, San Francisco, CA
2020 – current
Full Stack Developer
Following an eBay layoff and re-structuring in February of 2020, I resumed work on an information management system I had previously built for AdmissionWise, adding new features. A description of the system will be found below.
eBay, San Jose, CA
2017 – 2020
Sr. Director of Structured Data Engineering
eBay enables tens of millions of people to supplement their income, or go into business for themselves, with little or no capital investment, democratizing capitalism. The computer science at eBay sustains over 1.2 billion items for sale. I contributed to the development of a novel graph-based data store to function at that scale, expanded the scope and quality of data acquisition, and improved the orchestration of traditional programming and machine learning to process that data. I maintained high motivation and productivity in a globally distributed team varying in size from about 20 to about 40, spanning the US, Canada, the UK, Sweden, and Israel, even as the team absorbed multiple changes in leadership and multiple re-orgs. Our most senior engineering contributors came to me regularly for guidance, as did several in product management.
Admissionwise Consulting, San Francisco, CA
2014 – 2017
Full Stack Developer
Diving back into hands-on programming, conceived and built an information management system for this agency that helps students apply to the most prestigious colleges and universities. Filling all roles from product manager to database developer, I determined goals, features, visual design, usability, architecture, design, and implementation on a LAMP stack, producing a highly secure, responsive layout, single-page application. The head of the agency continues to be impressed with how much value it has brought, saying she could not run the company at its present scale without my software. I also provided consulting with respect to market stratification, product development, and staff training.
Cisco, San Jose, CA
2013 – 2014
Director of Engineering
With ISE serving as an enhanced AAA server at the heart of the network's security, employees and visitors can BYOD (bring your own device) and get onto the network while allowing each user access to only that portion of the network and those devices permitted to them based on who they are, where they are, what device they are using, the state of the device, and other situational factors. I managed about 40 people distributed between the US and Israel.
ServiceNow, San Jose, CA
2011 – 2012
Vice President of Engineering, Platform Group
IT trouble ticketing, inventorying, and change management. Established the company's first-ever QA team, and first-ever security engineering team. Eliminated over half of a huge inherited load of backlogged defects and produced the company's most reliable release to that date. I managed about 40 people split between Northern and Southern California.
Yodlee, Redwood Shores, CA
2009 – 2010
Vice President of Engineering
Consumer-facing web-based financial software. Established the company's first-ever architecture team, and mentored an entire set of just-promoted, remote, inexperienced managers while transitioning from waterfall to agile methodologies. Implemented a plugin architecture that allowed third parties to add apps that make use of the company's financial data-mining engine. I managed a global team about 120 people in the US and India.
Palamida, San Francisco, CA
2006 – 2009
Vice President of Engineering & Product Management
Detection of open source software within commercial code bases, to enable license compliance, and vulnerability patching. Transformed a one-person PC-based tool into a three-tier enterprise system, created an entirely new UI, and brought an 18-month data mining process down to a monthly cycle. Created from scratch a new product that alerted customers to CVE vulnerabilities in their code base. Transitioned the company to Scrum, greatly increasing transparency and reliability of development.
iPass, Redwood Shores, CA
2002 – 2006
Vice President of Engineering
World's largest enterprise-grade, secure, remote data network. Not a single user-visible outage on millions of connections per month running over networks operated by hundreds of independent providers around the globe. Created and installed a replacement for the customer billing and vendor payment system with zero business disruption. Completely re-architected the consumer-facing Windows client. Improved stability in backend servers. vetted and acquired three companies, adding unspoofable machine identification for IT policy enforcement regarding the device, and as transparent two-factor authentication for the user. I managed a distributed team of from about 20 growing to about 110 people in Northern California, Southern California, Israel, and India.
Comergent Technologies, Redwood Shores, CA
2000 – 2002
Vice President of Engineering
Web-based channel sales applications enabling enterprises to sell over the net without dis-intermediating desired partners for showrooms, installation, support, and sales. Produced the company's first-ever on-time releases, and vastly improved teamwork between product management and engineering. Managed a staff of about 50 people.
General Magic, Sunnyvale, CA
1995 – 2000
Vice President of Engineering & Operations,
Siri-like software 11 years before Siri
Director of Engineering, Siri-like software 11 years before Siri
Senior Manager, Personal info manager and web-based applications
Manager, Compiler (interpreter), and device-embedded OS and application development
Senior Engineer, Compiler (interpreter) development
Led development of virtual personal assistant technology that became the basis of voice-based assistance in the OnStar service from General Motors, a supplemental product offered by Excite, and an independent product called MyTalk. This work was made part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institute, for Outstanding Achievement in Information Technology in 1999. It was essentially Siri, about a dozen years before Siri was released by Apple. Helped develop a write-once and run anywhere interpreted language (Telescript) in the same time frame as the first releases of Java. Designed and implemented a multi-platform build system, reduced time from spec to release, simultaneously reducing bug count and increasing release pace to every three weeks instead of every few months. When I was hired the engineering department was about 20 people. I helped grow it to 50 in about a year, and later also had responsibility for a development partner with a staff of about 100.
Cadence Design Systems, San Jose, CA
1990 – 1994
Manager, Compiler support, software development tools and process
Engineer, Circuit design automation
Created software that was novel at that time – making the mouse cursor track plotted graphs and read out specific data points. Designed and implemented a hierarchical design language for analog ciruits. Became the founding manager of an inter-departmental group to establish standard tools and processes across a globally distributed software company that grew largely by acquisition of disparate product lines, technologies, and cultures. Supported use of and provided some debugging of the AT&T C++ pre-processor when that was state of the art. Participated in an ANSI standards meeting for C++, brought in the company's first-ever performance analysis tool, major contributor to design of company-wide product documentation standards and development processes. My team of about a half dozen people was leveraged across the work of about 2,000 engineers.
Hughes Aircraft Micro-Electronics Center, Carlsbad, CA
1984 – 1989
Engineer, Digital circuit design automation
Software for designing application-specific integrated circuits for use in the US space satellite program. Co-invented and solely implemented an interpreter for a language expressing complex digital circuitry in a manner that enabled less experienced electrical engineers to leverage rules and pre-built modules created by more senior contributors. Produced a patented methodology for QA-ing chips made with focused ion beam that prevented international sabotage and helped win a multi-million-dollar contract.
Publications & Patents
"MAP — A Parameterized Module Generator System Oriented to IC Designers", Scott Powell and Bennett Barouch, IEEE 1987 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.
"A Signal Tracking Chip Utilizing A VHSIC CMOS/SOS Structured Custom Design Methodology", Eby Friedman, et al., Government Microcircuit Applications Conference, Nov 1986 Digest of Papers.
Patent-applied user extensible expression evaluator that supports concurrent independent name spaces, hierarchical data structures, and user controlled varying degrees of evaluation, useful in electronics component definitions, annotation, simulation, and behavioral modeling. (The company scrapped its patent program while this was in process so the patent was not issued.)
Patent Number 5,121,335, a method for QA testing and for maintaining the secrecy of integrated circuits manufactured with focused ion beam, X-ray, laser, and other techniques, and in need of protection against international or industrial espionage. Hughes Division Award for Invention, for work covered by above patent.
Led work that became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institute, for Outstanding Achievement in Information Technology, 1999.
Articles in International Spectrum (professional journal for multi-value, NoSQL database developers). Keynote and session speaker at International Spectrum Conference.

Your inquiry is welcome at: bennett@bjbarouch.com