Ben Straub

• Action Flows: Led architecture and technical delivery of an automation platform from early product development through early access, general availability, and ongoing expansion.
• Action Platform APIs: Established the shared API and execution foundation adopted across AI, employee-service, partner, and internal products.
• Global MCP Gateway: Leading architecture and implementation of secure OAuth and MCP access for external AI marketplaces.
• Cross-product strategy: Aligning Action Flows, Approvals, Code Flows, AI agents, Employee Service, and ITAM around common platform capabilities.

Zendesk • 2016 — Present

Senior Staff Engineer • 2020 — Present

• Led workflow-automation product and platform. Served as technical lead before early access, through production hardening, and into its continued expansion as a foundation for advanced workflows. The product went from first prototype in late 2024 to early access in March 2025 to general availability in October 2025.
• Established the platform API ecosystem. Designed the APIs, execution model, collections, and permission architecture that enabled multiple product teams to build on a shared foundation to interop with each other and customer connections.
• Expanded the platform's influence across the product ecosystem. Working across organizational boundaries to align the product and platform with other product and AI agent teams. Enabled multiple other product features to ship on the shared platform, rather than isolated implementations.
• Improved the platform's operational foundation. Led architectural work on asynchronous execution, reliability, security, privacy, observability, and production incident response, along with targeted infrastructure efficiency improvements.
• Leading the Global MCP Gateway. Architecting and implementing a standards-based OAuth and MCP gateway that gives external AI marketplaces a stable integration point while preserving Zendesk's security and authorization model.

Gridium

2014 — 2016

Sixth engineer at an early-stage energy-analytics startup. I owned the full web-application stack (Docker/Kubernetes hosting, data storage, API design, and the front end) and helped establish the engineering culture and remote-working practices of a distributed team. I also represented the company at industry conferences, sharing lessons from building distributed teams and cloud-native systems.

GitHub

2012 — 2014

I worked on libgit2, an API-first implementation of Git with no dependencies on a UNIX environment, helping run the open-source project and write its documentation. That work carried into back-end systems, mainline Git, and the native clients that became GitHub Desktop.

Co-author of Pro Git, contributor to foundational Git tooling, and an experienced international speaker and trainer. I have spent much of my career making complex developer technologies understandable and usable, through direct contributions and teaching.

Pro Git, 2nd Edition

Co-author with Scott Chacon of Pro Git, the definitive book on Git, published by Apress and available free online. Helping developers new and old become better at their craft is a point of pride for me, and a strong reason why I do what I do.

Building Tools with GitHub

Contributed two chapters to Building Tools with GitHub: one on the search API (in Python), and one on the commit-status API (in C#).

Training

Delivered on-premises Kubernetes training through the Linux Foundation and its partners, and recorded courses on Git, Python, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Selected Talks

• Robots and Culture — how automation changes a company's culture, told through the addition of a chat bot to a team. Given at Joy of Coding 2015 (Rotterdam) and CascadiaFest 2015 (Blaine, WA). Slides.
• Better at Git — a tips-and-tricks talk on how a little knowledge of Git internals makes people more effective. Given at conferences including ConFoo (Montreal) and PHP Benelux (Antwerp) over two years. Slides.

• Platform and distributed-systems architecture
• Workflow, automation, and API ecosystems
• AI product infrastructure and MCP
• Reliability, security, and technical leadership

Monsoon Commerce (2011 — 2012) · Wacom Technology (2006 — 2011)

Portland State University

Master's Degree, Software Engineering • 2012

Oregon State University

Bachelor's Degree, Computer Engineering • 2003