Ben Belchak

Resume

Senior Engineering Leader @ Apple | Building agentic tools for engineering operations across Apple | ex-Sr EM @ Siri, ex-Head of SRE @ Shazam

Experience

Staff Software Engineer

Oct 2022 – Present · Raleigh, NC

Building agentic tools for rapid triaging and root cause analysis for several large teams across Apple, including all of Siri.
Member of AIOps Architecture Review Board.

Senior Engineering Manager – Siri

Apr 2020 – Oct 2022 · Seattle, WA

Managed the on-device runtime platform for the launch of the Vision Pro, then managed the cross-device Siri teams.

Sr. Engineering Manager

Nov 2018 – Apr 2020 · London, UK

Continued to manage the Shazam SRE team through the Apple acquisition and initial integration into Apple.
Guided the team through several privacy initiatives, and migration to Apple-managed infrastructure.

Head of Site Reliability Engineering and IT

Sep 2014 – Nov 2018 · London, UK

Led a team of 15 SREs and IT staff supporting Shazam at scale: tens of thousands of requests per second against a bespoke GPU search infrastructure indexing 40 million songs, ingesting up to 1 million tracks per day.
Transitioned the team from reactive fire-fighting into the development lifecycle; brought CI/CD and DevOps practices into the wider business.
Built the observability platform capturing 500,000+ metrics per second plus org-wide dashboards.
Cut on-call alerts, reduced alert fatigue, shortened MTTR; replaced a 24/7 staffed NOC with automated alerting.
Migrated from on-premise to GCP and AWS, moved many services to Kubernetes; one of GCP's first customers in Europe and first to use GPUs at scale.

Director of Technology

Apr 2010 – Aug 2014 · Bluffdale, UT

Built and scaled infrastructure for thousands of concurrent requests per second on a fan-sourcing platform deployed on major retailers' websites.
Led systems architects/engineers to fully automated provisioning and continuous deployment (Chef, Jenkins, Bamboo).
Built "Fretnot": one-button deployments with full-circle status reporting.
Developed the product with Django, Python, JavaScript, C, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, MySQL on AWS.
Development team lead; mentored junior developers.

Systems Architect

Jun 2006 – Apr 2010 · Salt Lake City, UT

Led a global data-center migration (Virginia, California, Hong Kong, UK, Australia).
Led systems architecture for Blue Coat's global cloud services.
Created a "data-center-in-a-box" single-server deployment of the cloud-service ratings system.

Software Engineer

Jun 2003 – Jun 2006 · Ogden, UT

Sr. Systems Administrator

Mar 2002 – Apr 2003 · Pittsburgh, PA

Sr. Systems Administrator

Sep 2001 – Mar 2002 · Salt Lake City, UT

Systems Administrator / Java Developer

Aug 1999 – Sep 2001 · Salt Lake City, UT

Network/Systems Engineer

May 1996 – May 2000

St. Athanasius College

Theology (in progress)

Treasurer, Parish Council Member — Holy Cross Orthodox Church

Jan 2024 – Present