Chris Stipes
Engineering Leader • Systems at Scale • Quality by Design
Let's work together to build reliable systems.
Engineering leader with 12+ years of experience across backend, platform, QA, and mobile engineering. I scale teams, modernize infrastructure, and build resilient, observable, and secure systems—integrating with external providers, driving API interoperability, and architecting AWS serverless data pipelines. Passionate about developer velocity, testing in production, and building high-impact platforms; hands-on with a people-first leadership style.
Ready to build?
I lead teams to ship stable, scalable platforms with strong SLOs, clean interfaces, and observability-first practices.
What I Do
Distributed Systems & APIs
Designing reliable, observable services with pragmatic interfaces and strong SLOs.
Quality & Performance Engineering
Shift-left testing, automation-first practices, and performance baselines baked into CI/CD.
ML/AI–adjacent Platforms
Building data pipelines and evaluation loops that turn models into production value.
Team Leadership
Coaching managers and ICs, raising the bar on delivery, standards, and outcomes.
Core Skills
Programming & Frameworks
Go, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, gRPC/Protobuf, GraphQL
Quality & Automation
Playwright, Appium, Cypress, Detox, Selenium, Postman, custom Go/Python test frameworks
Performance & Reliability
Locust, Grafana k6, Artillery, Observability-driven testing, CI/CD quality gates
Cloud & Platforms
AWS (S3, Lambda, SNS/SQS), Docker, Microservices, Snowflake
GenAI & Data
Prompt engineering, ML/AI quality validation, LLM-based test design (emerging), Python-based ML benchmarking tools
Blog
How I built this site and chat bot
A minimal Go service wrapping OpenAI + a clean Next.js/Tailwind frontend with a wired chat widget.
More writing coming soon
I share how I scale systems, teams, and testing culture.