Ben Cole

What I'm looking for

I build the operating systems that help engineering teams ship faster and run more reliably: clear ownership, CI/CD standards, observability, incident management, automation, and platform governance. I partner with Product, Finance, Security, and executive stakeholders to turn engineering strategy into measurable business outcomes.

I build the central technical organizations companies need when growth starts outrunning the operating model.

Across Expedia, The Pokémon Company, Prytania Media, and Lexipol, I repeatedly built or scaled platform, DevOps, infrastructure, SRE, DevSecOps, and shared-services functions in environments where fragmentation was slowing delivery, reliability, cost control, and governance. That included building Expedia’s first enterprise shared-services integration organization from 0 to 95 across four countries and six business units, scaling DevOps & platform engineering at The Pokémon Company from 2 to 32 while supporting platforms used by 320M users at 99.99% uptime, building Prytania Media’s shared-services organization from 0 to 35 across four studios, and scaling DevSecOps at Lexipol's from 5 to 24 in a regulated SaaS environment.

The goal was never team growth. The goal was building central engineering capability that produced better business outcomes: stronger reliability, faster incident response, tighter cloud cost governance, clearer executive visibility, more consistent delivery standards, and compliance built into the platform instead of bolted on later. My teams have delivered outcomes including MTTR reduction from four hours to 35 minutes at Expedia and to approximately one minute at The Pokémon Company, $4.5M in annual infrastructure savings at The Pokémon Company, 22% AWS spend reduction and 18% license rationalization at Lexipol, 50% reduction in prototype development at Prytania Media, and first-attempt SOC 2 Type II in a CJIS- and NIST-regulated environment.

I am strongest in multi-product, multi-business-unit, multi-studio, regulated, and post-acquisition environments where a company needs centralization without killing team autonomy. My work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, technical operations, DevOps, shared services, infrastructure, SRE, DevSecOps, FinOps, internal developer platforms, incident response, observability, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, compliance architecture, identity, and organizational scaling.

Target roles: VP / Head / Executive Director / COO-level leadership across Platform Engineering, Technical Operations, Infrastructure & SRE, DevSecOps, Shared Services, Platform Services, Central Engineering, and Core Platform Foundations.