ben.barrera

Hi, I'm Ben.
I build things.

/ 01 bio

Hello hello 馃憢,

I'm Ben, a CS student at the University of South Florida! Over multiple internships, I've worked on Rust-based distributed systems, Java-based backend services, event-driven pipelines, and nearline data processing systems across fintech, AI platforms, and military technology. I'm mainly focused on distributed systems and infrastructure work these days, so if you're working on something cool, reach out and we can chat!

I also occasionally do research on Google Scholar.

/ 03 stack
languages
  • Java
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • C#
  • C++
  • SQL
frameworks & tools
  • Spring Boot
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Django
  • Express
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
infrastructure
  • AWS
  • Kafka
  • Apache Beam & Spark
  • GraphQL
  • DynamoDB
  • Azure DevOps
/ 04 experience
  • Software Engineer Intern (Co-op)

    Oct 2025 to Present

    Northrop GrummanSt. Petersburg, FL

    • Contributed to Java based backend services for an operational readiness platform monitoring military equipment health and fault status, processing 5+ million events per day
    • Reduced status visibility lag by 24% by migrating from polling-based, batched updates to Kafka based event pipelines that propagate near-real-time equipment health and alert data
    • Improved Apache Beam and Spark workflows that cut processing latency by 19% by reducing shuffle costs, parallelizing operations, and removing batch boundaries in nearline telemetry processing
  • Software Developer Intern

    Aug 2025 to Oct 2025

    GradualSan Francisco, CA

    • Architected AI Agents in Next.js with MCP connections to GitHub, MongoDB, and ClickHouse to query 100GB+ of company events data and to generate charts/graphs using AI SDK
    • Deployed containerized AI agents and data services to a Kubernetes demo environment, using Deployments and Services to scale to 3 to 5 replicas and enable repeatable execution
  • Software Engineer Intern

    May 2025 to Aug 2025

    BillSan Jose, CA

    • Implemented workflow using AWS SQS, Lambda, and API Gateway to resend and resolve over 700 failed webhook subscription events weekly
    • Improved backend performance by building 6 new REST endpoints in Java (Spring Boot) and boosting query speed by 22% with index-backed lookups, prefix-based queries, and 4 global secondary indexes
    • Developed React-based subscription querying tool and enhanced GraphQL endpoint with webhook schema integration, saving ~5 hours weekly for developers
/ 05 say hi

Want to talk?

Drop a line if you're building something interesting, want to collaborate, or just feel like saying hello.