Ben Emdon

Making software development faster and safer at Stripe. Previously GitHub.

whoami#

role Engineering manager

team Code Forge, Code Review

org Stripe

where Ottawa, ON, Canada

about#

I am interested in the systems between writing code and safely shipping it. I like making large codebases feel fast, understandable, and easy to change.

At Stripe, I lead Code Forge and Code Review. We build source control infrastructure for Stripe's massive, fast-moving Git monorepo and improve the code review process, including an AI reviewer designed to catch problems before production and eventually approve lower-risk changes. Before Stripe, I was at GitHub.

Technical interests: version control systems, blob-storage-backed database design, agent harness development, and developer productivity.

Otherwise: pickleball, strategy games like Magic: The Gathering and Twilight Imperium, exploring cities near and far, and going max effort at karaoke.

thinking#

work#

2025 to now

Stripe: Engineering manager

  • Manage 11 direct reports and 3 cross-appointed engineers across Code Forge and Code Review.
  • Lead engineering strategy in partnership with technical leaders across Stripe's Git monorepo infrastructure, code review process, and AI code reviewer.
  • Coordinated 15+ infrastructure teams to move Stripe's BFCM code freeze from global to opt-out by service; now helping make it opt-in.

2022 to 2025

Stripe: Software engineer

  • Launched stacked pull request tooling so engineers work on dependent changes without blocking on review.
  • Built an auto-merge system that cut time-to-production by over an hour per pull request company-wide.
  • Built centralized ownership infrastructure for code, service, and feature-flag ownership across every platform team.

2018 to 2022

GitHub: Software engineer

2016 to 2017

Shopify: Software engineer intern

  • On the iOS team, helped kickstart the Shopify mobile app before its initial launch, including the dashboard users see when they open it.
  • On the Graph team, helped kickstart Shopify's first GraphQL API.
  • Written up by Shopify Engineering.

2015 to 2020

Carleton University: B.C.S. (Honours), Distinction

  • Honours thesis on GraphQL vs. REST, published by IEEE.
  • Apple WWDC Scholar, 2017 and 2018.

elsewhere#