Ben Nusser
Ben Nusser

Staff Software Engineer - Agent Systems & AI Platform

Actively looking · Member since 11 Sep 2026
Message
Location
West Hollywood, United States
Desired salary
Unspecified
Work preference
Remote Only
Experience level
Senior

About

Professional summary

I am a Staff Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience building production backend, distributed systems, and AI agent platforms at Creative Artists Agency, Apple, Disney, Sharp Electronics, and Cloudnine Realtime.

I specialize in designing reliable agent runtimes, orchestration systems, evaluation and release workflows, permission-aware retrieval services, and shared SDKs. My work makes AI systems deterministic where necessary, observable when failures occur, and safe to evolve in production.

My strongest programming languages are Go, Python, and TypeScript. I build scalable services using PostgreSQL, Kafka, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Redis, and modern observability practices.

I have led architecture for globally distributed services and event-driven systems that handle high traffic, resilient retries, idempotent execution, schema evolution, caching, and progressive delivery. I prioritize reliability, SLOs, incident response, and reducing operational complexity for teams that depend on shared platforms.

I also have deep experience in AI platform engineering, including RAG, vector and hybrid retrieval, reranking, LLM gateways, model routing, structured outputs, tool calling, MCP, human-in-the-loop workflows, and evaluation-driven release gates.

I enjoy setting technical standards, evaluating vendor and build-versus-buy decisions, and partnering with product teams to deliver secure, scalable systems with measurable business and engineering impact.

Skills

30 capabilities

Tech stack & tools

Working toolkit

Application Hosting

Data Stores

Monitoring

Experience

Career history

Staff Software Engineer Creative Artists Agency (CAA)

Defined the architecture for a shared production agent platform used by six product teams, standardizing orchestration, retrieval, model access, and evaluation contracts. Reduced typical AI feature integration time from 10 engineering days to 4 days.

Designed a centralized agent runtime with typed state contracts, idempotent tool execution, bounded retries, human approvals, and per-handoff tracing, increasing workflow completion from 84% to 96%. Built permission-aware RAG services, evaluation-driven release gates, and shared agent SDKs while leading vendor and build-versus-buy decisions.

Senior Software Engineer Apple (Apple TV)

Owned backend architecture for a global Apple TV service domain, redesigning microservice boundaries and API contracts across content and playback flows. Reduced cross-service fan-out and improved p95 request latency by 28%.

Scaled distributed backend systems handling millions of daily requests and traffic spikes above three times baseline through request coalescing, cache partitioning, and load shedding. Improved resilience with dependency timeouts, circuit breakers, staged rollouts, automated rollback signals, and reusable service libraries.

Software Engineer The Walt Disney Company

Built event-driven backend services for Disney+ subscription and entitlement updates, using event-ID deduplication and idempotent state transitions to safely replay events after downstream failures.

Improved operational visibility by propagating correlation IDs through queue processing and entitlement calls, tracking backlog age and dependency errors. Created shared event-contract tooling with schema versioning and CI compatibility checks, and optimized playback telemetry pipelines to maintain consumer lag below one minute on premiere nights.

Software Engineer Sharp Electronics Corp

Developed backend APIs connecting Sharp multifunction printers to enterprise cloud document services. Normalized print, scan, and device-status payloads so workflows worked across hardware generations and firmware revisions.

Implemented OAuth 2.0 authorization for Google Drive, SharePoint, and Dropbox connectors. Isolated credentials by customer tenant, automated token refresh, and ensured integrations failed closed when administrators revoked access.

Full Stack Engineer Cloudnine Realtime

Built and shipped a customer administration portal for hosted QuickBooks and Sage environments. Enabled customers to provision users and update access directly.

Reduced support dependency for routine account administration by replacing manual support requests and re-entry workflows with self-service functionality.

Education

Learning history

University of Colorado Boulder

Master of Science, Computer Science

Western Oregon University

Bachelor of Science, Communications & Business

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