Ben Calabrese
Senior Software Engineer
Profile
About

Hi, I'm Ben: a seasoned software engineer with experience leading massive scale web applications that power both enterprise and commercial products.
For the past two years I've led the YouTube Kids Living Room team — delivering a kids tailored experience on smart TVs to millions of families. Prior to that, I spent time at Google building and leading frontend projects in Greentea, the CRM that underlies Google's sales team.
In addition to tackling the most technically challenging problems on my projects, I'm a reliable leader: mentoring teammates, guiding architecture, and reviewing code.
Since joining Google, I've:
- Designed and built architecture used by web applications across YouTube
- Owned the configuration language that powers every chart and table in Google Ads and Greentea
- Established myself as a leader in code health across Google, writing best practices on testing and reviewing readability of code for > 200 engineers
Projects I lead are: consumer quality, on-time, comprehensively tested, and ready for new features.
I'm always gearing up for my next challenge.
Skills
-
TypeScriptJavaScript
-
DartReact
-
SassCI/CD
-
TestingHTML
-
AngularDartCSS
-
RubyRails
-
GitSQL
-
PythonAWS
Education
App Academy
May 2016
1000 hour-coding school with <5% acceptance rate
Coursework includes: Rails, TDD, OOP, single-page apps, coding style, scalability, algorithms, best practices

S.F. State University
B.A. Drama, May 2013 Summa Cum Laude
Experience
YouTube
Senior Software Engineer July 2019–Present
- Tech lead of the YouTube Kids smart TV app, setting its technical direction, collaborating with PM/UX, and mentoring more junior engineers
- Expanded reach by millions of DAUs, including launches on Apple TV, Fire TV, and Virgin Media
- Drove cross-YouTube projects such as supporting Lottie animations on living room devices
- Thrived and innovated while working with complex constraints such as limited user input mechanisms and low memory/compute devices
- Shepherded Google wide code health as author of best practices on screenshot testing and as one of ~40 engineers selected for the Dart readability team
Software Engineer Sept. 2016–July 2019
- Led frontend development on multiple projects from initial design through to launch
- Designed key aspects of Connect Sales, Google's custom CRM, including integration with the support ticket system
- Co-owner of custom configuration language used to power all tables, forms, and charts in Google Ads and Connect Sales
Projects
Resume
Live | GitHubYou're reading it!
- Animations for the web while still styled for print
- For fun, it's mostly hand rolled rather than using a framework. Just TS, Sass, and some Handlebars templating.
- Some pretty interesting CSS animations. I used transforms with hidden overflow borders to give the appearance of expanding since reflow properties like height don't animate smoothly.
Constellations
Live | GitHubConway's Game of Life simulator
- Pure JavaScript game written at App Academy
- HTML5 canvas rendering with controls for pan, zoom, and cycle speed
- Pans infinitely (Theoretically at least. It'll overflow eventually but it would take a while.)
- Added my own wrinkle of letting users add new dots to the board mid-animation
PickupTix
Live | GitHubRails/React event ticketing app
- Full stack, end of course project for App Academy
- Might take a second to spin up (it's on the Heroku free plan)
- Dynamic show filter using ActiveRecord to combine arbitrary filter options into a single query
- Interactive seat picker for more engaging point-and-click UI