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Ben "The Automator" Christensen
Automation and AI-assisted engineering. Turns manual, repetitive work into systems that run without being watched.
- CEO and Co-Founder
- Years of experience: 20+
- Has led a 22-person engineering organization
- Automated his own job twice
- Focus: automation, AI-assisted engineering, security
Over a 20-year career
- 230 roles'worth of work automated, worth more than $20M a year at market pay
- 650,000 hoursof tasks automated
- Tenindustries: Banking, Fintech and Payments, Healthcare, Government and Federal Contracting, Managed Security Services, Security Software, Higher Education, Travel and Hospitality, Web Hosting and Domains, Agricultural Technology
Origin story
Background
I automate the work nobody should be doing by hand. Over 20 years I have automated 230 roles' worth of work and 650,000 hours of tasks across ten industries, including my own job, twice.
At Nairobi Lighting, where I am fractional VP of Technology, I built the software: the iOS app, the build, test and release pipelines, security, email, event registration, the firmware portal, and the test harnesses for its ESP32 development kits. I am also the fractional CIO of the Kentucky College of Art + Design, the same kind of leadership Hexvar offers you, and I founded Automator Solutions.
I give back where I learned: mentoring in security and IT at CactusCon and EVSec, and spending a full day each year teaching kids to code with the Kyrene School District.
Titles held
- Principal Engineer
- Engineering Manager
- Vice President of Technology
- CIO
- CTO
- CEO
It is a superpower, not a death sentence.
Where Ben works today
Kentucky College of Art + Design
Automator Solutions
Results Ben has delivered
Outcomes
Cleared a two-and-a-half-year encryption backlog at a national bank, the work of a five-person contractor team, worth $3.64M
Migrated 200 playbooks and 20,000 automation steps between security automation platforms for a Fortune 50 company with zero downtime, protecting more than $11.4M per hour in operations
Saved $455K a year by cutting a 1,140-hour reporting cycle to 10 minutes, letting a managed security provider scale past 300 clients without new hires
Wrote the Heartbleed detection signature shipped to customers of a major web host
Recognition and training
Recognition
- Inaugural technical advisory board, Revelstoke Security
- Technical advisory board, CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale
- Recognized with an internal award for vulnerability remediation
- Author, Demystifying Automation: A Non-Technical Guide to Streamlining Your Business
- Author, Demystifying Cybersecurity. Every Hexvar client gets a copy in their welcome kit.
Education and certifications
- Master's in Information Security Engineering, South University
- Bachelor's in Computer and Information Systems Security, University of Phoenix
- CPDE
- DevOps Foundation
- Trend Micro Certified Professional, Deep Security 9
More than 18,000GitHub contributions in the past year across 175 repositories of my own (as of November 2026)
Work with Ben.
Five quick questions, and your starting plan builds as you answer.