I'm Ben Stef.

Minor in Economics. Studied core subjects including Circuit Analysis, Control Systems, Electromagnetics, Digital Signal Processing, Power Systems, and Microelectronics. First Place — UIC College of Engineering EXPO 2007, Category 9: User Interface and Education ("TypeMouse: Fully Functional Keyboard and Mouse in a Single-Handed Device").

Support the Employee Platforms division, maintaining collaboration and communication tools (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and more) for ~350,000 JPMorgan employees globally. Authored and maintained Terraform infrastructure-as-code to deploy services and infrastructure on AWS. Partnered directly with Product Managers to translate business requirements into technical solutions, and provided architectural guidance to internal App Development teams. Implemented Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Events, and Exchange Calendar integration to improve employee experience.

Served as senior escalation point, collaborating with engineering teams to reproduce and resolve complex customer-reported issues across 600+ Datadog integrations. Specialized in the Agent Integrations team across infrastructure, cloud, web, metrics, and monitoring domains. Built internal sandbox environments on AWS, Azure, and GCP; authored knowledge base articles focused on Windows platform integrations (Active Directory, Windows Events, Deployments). Led daily team office hours sessions with Tech Solutions peers and L1 engineers.

Served as primary escalation point for application issues including latency, performance bottlenecks, and hang-ups in Relativity, Relativity One, Venio, and LAW. Managed and administered the company-wide Zoom environment; assisted the InfoSec team with SOC 2 audit tasks including user access reviews and security remediation. Performed regular application upgrades (BrainSpace, Venio, Relativity) across production and test environments. Part of the global IT and infrastructure team focused on high-availability e-Discovery systems. Company subsequently merged with Legility LLC.

Served as primary engineer for multiple client environments, managing all infrastructure, hardware, and licensing documentation. Provided SME expertise on e-Discovery infrastructure to clients across legal and financial sectors. Led incident response for production outages; coordinated with vendors (Microsoft, Dell, VMware) for escalations. Notable engagements: Relativity SQL performance tuning & database migrations; year-long on-site FX Trading Platform support (IBM Netezza) at a major NYC investment bank; 6-month European deployment leading infrastructure for a large-scale Relativity rollout.

Built and maintained VMware environments with multiple ESX/ESXi hosts, vCenters, and VM templates across iSCSI, Fiber, and SAS configurations. Wrote and reviewed product documentation, test cases, and acceptance test cases prior to each release. Conducted competitor analysis and performance benchmarking; analyzed and documented software defects with detailed reproduction steps. Gained specialized expertise in VSS backup solutions, testing functionality with vRanger Pro and Veeam.

Finalized software requirements and test plans based on customer specifications; traveled on-site to assess environments and validate deployments. Deployed operator-grade software into wireless carriers' networks across global clients in Hong Kong, Italy, Lithuania, and Turkey. Installed and configured proprietary software on blade servers (Tomcat) for performance and load testing on Linux.

Provided helpdesk support for pharmacy faculty and students, troubleshooting hardware, network, and software issues. Maintained user accounts, installed network software, and repaired/installed PCs. Documented detailed resolution steps for recurring issues to build a departmental knowledge base.