Ben Paternostro

Senior Software Engineer

Sydney, Australia contact@benpaternostro.com Website

Full-stack engineer with a deep quality-engineering and reliability background. I build primarily with AI coding agents these days, and hold that work to the same bar as anything else I ship: tests, types, review, and observability.

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Experience

Senior Software Engineer — Greenstone Financial Services

Mar 2026 to Present · Sydney, NSW, Australia

Own feature delivery and platform observability across customer-facing insurance and financial services portals serving tens of thousands of users.

  • Deliver most feature work with coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot), applying established planning and implementation patterns while managing context quality and model cost
  • Hold AI-written code to the same bar as any other change (TDD, type and lint gates in CI, code review), using MCP integrations to give agents the project context needed for planning and implementation
  • Led adoption of OpenTelemetry, OpenFeature (with LaunchDarkly), and Storybook, enabling end-to-end observability, progressive feature delivery, and component development with a visual-regression testing layer
  • Consolidated observability into Datadog (logs, metrics, traces, RUM) for unified system visibility
  • Improved the E2E framework to run in ~2 minutes by spinning up ephemeral environments in CI, bypassing third-party auth, caching sessions, and parallelising test execution
  • Built a self-service test-data API into the pre-prod login flow, replacing manual DB access and becoming the organisation's default entry point to test environments
  • Moved the team to routine business-hours deployments, making out-of-hours releases and manual production validation the exception rather than the norm

Senior Software QA Engineer — Greenstone Financial Services

Mar 2025 to Feb 2026 · Sydney, NSW, Australia

Owned test automation strategy, frameworks, and test observability across customer-facing portals.

  • Designed and implemented a Playwright end-to-end testing framework replacing legacy Selenium
  • Integrated test framework into Azure DevOps pipelines for release-gated automation
  • Built custom Teams notifications and observability dashboards for test outcomes
  • Implemented visual regression testing for large-scale dynamic PDF rendering
  • Built API automation using generated OpenAPI clients to improve onboarding
  • Authored RFCs and engineering proposals covering continuous delivery, canary deployments, and test observability
  • Led workshops and pair-programming sessions to uplift QA and engineering teams

QA Automation Lead — Simpology Australia

Mar 2024 to Jan 2025 · Sydney, NSW, Australia

Led company-wide automation strategy, roadmap, and platform implementation.

  • Defined organisational test automation strategy and rollout roadmap
  • Built Playwright E2E and Postman/Newman API frameworks with CI/CD integration
  • Drove shift-left testing and improved application testability with developer collaboration
  • Migrated legacy Cypress/Selenium suites and implemented infrastructure automation
  • Embedded observability and business metrics for ROI and quality reporting
  • Mentored and upskilled manual testers into automation engineers through workshops, pairing, and documentation

Senior Software QA Engineer — DroneShield

Oct 2023 to Mar 2024 · Sydney, NSW, Australia

Owned QA automation and release quality for distributed systems and hardware/software integration.

  • Designed and maintained automation frameworks in CI/CD pipelines
  • Improved frontend and integration test coverage across complex distributed systems
  • Partnered with engineering teams on risk-based test planning and release readiness

Senior Site Reliability Engineer — Rokt

Feb 2023 to Sep 2023 · Sydney, NSW, Australia

Led reliability initiatives across cloud-native services with incident management ownership.

  • Led high-severity incidents through investigation, mitigation, and resolution, and facilitated incident-management training across teams
  • Implemented SLOs and tuned alerting strategies to reduce operational noise
  • Drove service-catalog ownership models, reliability scorecards, and service tiering
  • Supported full continuous delivery: releases gated only by automated tests, rolled out via Argo Rollouts, and monitored in Datadog with automated rollback
  • Built automation and tooling in Go, Python, Bash, and Terraform across AWS and Kubernetes

Senior Software Engineer (QA) — Rokt

May 2021 to Jan 2023 · Sydney, NSW, Australia

Built multi-language quality platforms for functional, contract, visual, and load testing across a 100+ service ecosystem.

  • Implemented Pact contract testing across more than a dozen services in multiple languages
  • Rolled out visual regression testing, reducing customer-reported UI defects and enabling safer CI/CD deployments
  • Built k6 performance and load testing for experimentation and production traffic replay
  • Delivered company-wide training, demos, and framework handovers; received the company-wide 'Hidden Value' award

Software Engineer (QA) — Rokt

Feb 2020 to May 2021 · Sydney, Australia

Built automation for microservices and ML-adjacent systems in an agile delivery environment.

  • Implemented functional, integration, and contract test coverage
  • Improved existing Selenium/Gauge end-to-end framework
  • Collaborated cross-functionally on test strategy and edge-case design

Software Development Engineer in Test — Prospa

May 2019 to Jan 2020 · Sydney, Australia

Built reusable automation frameworks and enabled CI/CD-based quality gates.

  • Built Protractor UI and Mocha/Chai API test frameworks
  • Implemented Appium mobile automation and test-data generation tooling
  • Coached manual testers and developers on test automation practices

Software Engineer — Medical Director

Oct 2017 to Apr 2019 · Sydney, Australia

Worked across full-stack development, TDD, and CI/CD automation in agile teams.

  • Delivered end-to-end product features
  • Maintained and improved CI/CD pipelines
  • Contributed to test-first engineering practices

Graduate / Junior Software Engineer — Medical Director

Apr 2016 to Sep 2017 · Sydney, Australia

Joined through a graduate engineering program with rotations across software development and test automation.

  • Built feature automation and dashboard tooling
  • Delivered bug fixes and enhancements across frontend and backend systems

Education

  • Western Sydney University — Bachelor, Information and Communications Technology (2013 - 2016)
  • Austin Peay State University — Study Abroad Semester, Computer Science (2015 - 2015)

Skills

  • AI Tooling: Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, MCP, Agent Skills
  • Programming Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, C#, Python, Go, SQL, PowerShell, Bash
  • Cloud & DevOps: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Azure DevOps, Buildkite, Octopus Deploy
  • Quality & Observability: Playwright, Test-Driven Development, Visual Regression, Contract Testing, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, RUM
  • Spoken Languages: Spanish (Elementary)

Honors & Awards

  • Australian Computer Society Foundation Scholarship
  • Dean's Merit List
  • Australian Government Scholarship

Selected Projects

  • Angla

    A fishing weather and Instagram-style social app.