Hi, I'm Ben 👋

Simply Business is an FCA-regulated commercial insurance broker with over a million active customers. I work in Product Engineering, building and owning customer-facing features end to end across a Ruby on Rails monolith with a React frontend - partnering with product, design, data and delivery from ideation through to production, and presenting the team's work at company demo days.

• Drove delivery of a new 'personalised cover' experience that cut complexity for customers and increased policy purchase rate by 10.4% - the largest sales uplift in the company's history, recognised with its 'Experimentation Excellence' award.
• Built an event-driven cover recommendation engine on Kafka, powering ML-driven personalisation for around 6,000 sales journeys a day from live questionnaire answers and historical sales.
• Own production reliability for the customer-facing quoting monolith as part of the UK-timezone response team, triaging and resolving alerts through Airbrake and New Relic, and contributing to incident review alongside product, data, compliance and legal.
• Co-developed the team's AI-assisted development workflows and presented them at Simply Business's internal AI-native development forum

team.blue is one of Europe's largest hosting and digital enablement groups. I worked across its UK server brands on both legacy and modern systems, primarily in Ruby on Rails and Python. I joined part-time, alongside a concurrent support role and my BSc, and moved to engineering full-time in July 2024.

• Seamlessly migrated and integrated thousands of customers from legacy in-house billing systems onto a turnkey group-wide platform.
• Worked to eliminate two decades of accumulated technical debt in the company's datacenter management systems, improving both their stability and the day-to-day processes built on them.

catalyst2 is a long-established UK managed web hosting provider, and part of team.blue. I provided first- and second-line support across phone, email and live chat - handling technical and billing queries, building and maintaining servers, and diagnosing more complex issues. I worked as part of a team delivering award-winning customer service.

A volunteer trustee role at the Sawtry Youth Project, a local charity set up to improve sport and leisure amenities for young people in Sawtry, Cambridgeshire. Our central goal was to secure the funding and permission to build a skatepark. I took minutes at committee meetings that shaped the direction of the Project, represented it at local government meetings and committees, ran its website and social media channels, and engaged with the community both online and at our fundraising events.

• Successfully lobbied the Parish Council for permission to build the skatepark.
• Fundraised £20,000 and secured additional grant funding to deliver the project.

Responsible for greeting customers in the store, assessing their queries and needs, as well as processing sales and providing technical and account support. As part of the Phoneshop team, I was responsible for inspiring enthusiasm and customer confidence in technology, and ensuring customers walked out happy every time. During my time at Tesco Mobile, I was recognised for consistently high customer satisfaction (NPS) scores, and routinely meeting sales targets.