Ben Bonora
Technology leader and engineer
Based in Seattle, WA. Over 15 years building and leading engineering teams in the media and radio industry. I direct engineering for content tools at Audacy, overseeing the platforms and pipelines that power 250+ station websites. I care as much about growing people and building healthy teams as I do about building great software — hiring, mentoring, and creating environments where engineers do their best work. Currently exploring how AI tools like Claude Code and MCP servers can accelerate engineering workflows.
Experience
Director of Engineering, Content Tools
Audacy, Inc. — Dec 2020–PresentLead multiple engineering teams of 5–10 engineers, including FTEs and offshore contractors. Own Audacy's content platform — Experience API, ROC, Unity CMS, podcast system, content enrichment pipeline, push notifications, and transcription engine. Collaborate with business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions. Manage vendor relationships and contracts. Drove migration to event-driven microservices with Kafka on AWS.
Software Engineering Manager
Audacy, Inc. — Nov 2017–Dec 2020Managed 20+ engineers and tech leads overseeing content services for web and mobile. Merged teams from Entercom and CBS Radio post-acquisition into cohesive, collaborative units. Hired, mentored, and developed team members across experience levels. Led CMS migration from Drupal to Clay for 250+ sites serving 6M unique visitors/month and 230M page views. Transitioned to self-hosted AWS for significant cost savings.
Technical Lead
Entercom — May 2014–Nov 2017Architected a scalable Drupal 7 platform supporting 150+ radio station websites with 18M page views and 4M unique visitors/month. Designed a pattern library supporting multiple brand identities from a single codebase. Migrated 150+ sites from proprietary CMS and WordPress.
Digital Director
Entercom — Sep 2010–May 2014Drove digital product development across four Seattle radio stations (KISW, KNDD, KKWF, KHTP/KMTT). Created digital products for major events including Deck the Hall Ball, Pain in The Grass, and EndSessions.
Developer / Designer
J2 Golf Marketing — Jul 2006–Oct 2010End-to-end website development from requirements gathering to launch. Built custom CMS modules, managed LAMP servers, and ran email marketing campaigns.
Skills
Leadership & Management
Technical
Projects
Experience API
Content delivery and personalization platform serving Audacy's web and mobile apps. Powers dynamic content views, search, personalized recommendations via AWS Personalize, and location-based content with three-tier caching.
ROC (Radio Operations Center)
Internal platform for radio station management. Monorepo with 5 services handling station ops, show/episode scheduling, push notification campaigns, user access control, and media asset management.
Unity CMS
CMS platform powering audacy.com, built on Clay/Amphora. Handles article publishing, station-specific routing, scheduled content, RSS feeds, and layout management for 250+ station websites.
Content Enrichment Pipeline
Kafka Streams applications that transform raw content into enriched, relationship-aware entities. Handles parent-child relationships, market metadata, AI tagging, and normalization into a unified schema across 11 pluggable sub-topologies.
Podcasts System
Microservices platform for podcast content — 9 services handling RSS ingestion, Listen Notes integration, image processing, and a REST API. Manages thousands of podcasts with automated refresh cycles.
Transcription Engine
AI-powered transcription service using Whisper models. Generates text from audio with speaker diarization and host identification. Processes podcast episodes and broadcast content via Kafka and Celery workers.
AI-Augmented Engineering
Built an MCP server for semantic search across internal engineering documentation. Using Claude Code for rapid prototyping, code generation, and workflow automation. Integrating AI tools into day-to-day engineering leadership to accelerate team output.