Ben Hankins

Solutions Engineer with 7+ years across the full customer technical lifecycle: discovery, POC, and technical evaluation through production deployment. Spent five years in IBM Client Engineering across 12 named enterprise accounts, supporting $13M in pipeline anchored by a $10.1M engagement at CenterPoint Energy, where hands-on Terraform and OpenShift work turned technical evaluations into signed, deployed infrastructure. Works across AWS, GCP, and IBM Cloud in regulated industries, combining customer-facing discovery with infrastructure depth and hands-on delivery from demo through deployment.

Founder & Solutions Engineer at Sproutflow Studio (2025-10 – Present)

• Own the end-to-end technical sales cycle for small-business clients, from discovery and proposal through solution scoping, delivery, handoff, and retainer expansion.
• Converted 3 one-time projects into recurring retainers covering uptime monitoring, security patching, and version-controlled deployments.
• Delivered measurable client outcomes: a 30% increase in customers for NOLA Pool Solutions, a 120% increase in bookings for Nealy's Event Decor, and a 25% increase in inquiries for DJN Services LLC after launching its first digital presence.

Site Reliability Engineer at Prove AI (2025-01 – 2025-09)

• Drove SOC 2 Type II from a 34% Vanta baseline to a passed audit in six months under the CISO. Starting from company-wide open access with no policies in place, authored least-privilege IAM across the org, established repository security and branch-protection rules, and owned policy authoring and evidence collection across production infrastructure.
• Kept production stable across 4 Kubernetes clusters with a single incident in nine months, and introduced structured, automated CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Helm) where deployments had been manual and ad hoc, cutting deployment time roughly 80%.
• Built OpenSearch dashboards for error tracing across all services and environments, with severity-based filtering that cut mean time to resolution 67%.

Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at IBM — Client Engineering (2023-04 – 2024-08)

• Stood up Cencora's move from ODM to Automated Decision Services on CP4BA/OpenShift: configured ADS, installed the Nexus Repository Operator for artifact management, and authored a reusable deployment runbook supporting a $200K ADS opportunity.
• Authored the full Terraform / IBM Schematics codebase (VPCs, VSIs, security groups, bastion hosts, storage, load balancers) that cut a multi-hour environment build to roughly 4 minutes; the client cloned 29 environments themselves while I ran several concurrent accounts and led skill transfer.
• Deployed and operated Cloud Pak for Data and supporting AI/data services on Red Hat OpenShift using cpd-cli, OLM, custom resources, storage classes, and pull secrets; built GitOps patterns with Argo CD, Kustomize, and Tekton.

Cloud Engineer (Client-Facing Solutions Engineering) at IBM — Client Engineering (2021-02 – 2023-03)

• Built client-facing MVPs and demos including AT&T's Connected Transportation UI (Next.js + Google Maps, geofencing, EMV markers, Snap-to-Roads routing) and Boeing's HR/job-description prototype (React, Carbon, D3); executed POCs and live demos that advanced technical evaluations toward signing.
• Proactively trained on Terraform ahead of client demand, then led architecture scoping and the technical evaluation that closed CenterPoint Energy's $10.1M SAP RISE engagement as the only Terraform specialist in the department. Transitioned embedded post-close to own production infrastructure delivery, scaling from 2 to 49 OpenShift environments with Terraform and Helm.
• Led development of pre-sales environments and reusable Terraform automation for client-facing technical evaluations across AWS, GCP, and IBM Cloud.
• Worked hands-on with watsonx.governance and Watson OpenScale for AI model governance and evaluation, configuring prompt evaluation and custom quality monitors; mentored junior technical specialists through discovery frameworks, POC shadowing, and an IBM patent filing.

Client Technical Specialist (Solutions Engineering) at IBM — Client Engineering (2019-12 – 2021-01)

• Led technical discovery and delivered Cloud Pak POCs across Data, Business Automation, and Multi-Cloud; provisioned CP4D/CP4BA environments through TechZone and ROKS. Promoted to Cloud Engineer after 14 months.
• Modernized client Java applications for cloud scalability and built Tekton CI/CD pipelines, reducing deployment times 35%.

Front End Developer (Contract) at Kortivity (2019-01 – 2019-06)

• Designed, built, and maintained a Vue-based web scraper Chrome extension enabling recruiters to scrape candidate profiles and gather contact information for outreach, directly supporting the company's core recruiting workflow.

B.A. in Communication & Media Studies – Mississippi State University (2017)

Software Engineering Bootcamp – General Assembly (2018)