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Ben Paternostro

Senior Software Engineer

Sydney, Australia · contact@benpaternostro.com · benpaternostro.com · LinkedIn

Full-stack engineer shipping customer-facing software with AI-assisted workflows, rigorous testing, and production observability.

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)

Experience

Senior Software Engineer — Greenstone Financial Services
Mar 2026 – Present
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, review, observability), 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 – Feb 2026
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 – Jan 2025
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 – Mar 2024
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 – Sep 2023
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 – Jan 2023
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 – May 2021
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 – Jan 2020
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 – Apr 2019
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 – Sep 2017
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

Honors & Awards

Selected Projects

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