Chris Ross

Senior Staff Engineer

Phoenix, AZ · linkedin.com/in/ckross · github.com/ckross01 · ckross01.com

Summary

Senior Staff Engineer with 15+ years of experience building distributed systems and backend infrastructure at scale. Deep expertise in Go and Node.js, with a strong track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives — from greenfield platform design to legacy modernization. Known for anchoring technical designs to business outcomes: identifying customer impact, escalation risk, and revenue exposure to prioritize engineering investments that matter. Combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership — setting architecture direction, owning TDD processes, driving observability and reliability practices, and mentoring engineers across teams. Experienced across the full stack of distributed systems: event-driven architectures, data pipelines, API platforms, IAM, and cloud-native infrastructure on GCP and AWS.

Technical Skills

Experience

Senior Staff Engineer · Quantum Metric

Nov 2020 – Present

Digital analytics platform helping enterprises track user behavior, errors, and friction across web and mobile.

• Lead engineer and maintainer of the alerting platform, serving 500+ enterprise clients. The system continuously queries and evaluates customer behavioral data against defined conditions, with strong reliability across evaluation, notification delivery, and uptime — all monitored through self-built Grafana dashboards and alerting pipelines.
• Modernized the alerting system from a legacy architecture, including designing and shipping a customer-facing integration layer that allows clients to route alert notifications into their own tooling and workflows.
• Authored technical design documents grounded in business outcomes — most recently for alert stability improvements, mapping proposed fixes to customer bug reports, escalation history, and ARR at risk to prioritize highest-impact work.
• Building a case management platform and integration framework enabling customers to route and manage issues directly from the analytics platform, with connectors to major enterprise ticketing and CRM systems.
• Architected and led cross-team delivery of a new survey data platform — owning the project from RFP through implementation, including cross-functional coordination, delivery milestones, and system design for on-site survey collection.
• Reduced memory consumption across Node.js services by 35% through deep runtime profiling — building internal observability tooling with Grafana and OpenTelemetry to instrument heap and system-level metrics and drive targeted optimization.
• Built and maintained platform systems including internal APIs, database migration pipelines, third-party integrations, and IAM solutions across a ~50 engineer organization.
• Regularly lead design reviews, own TDD processes, set cross-team technical standards, and mentor engineers — operating at the intersection of hands-on engineering and broad technical leadership.

Principal Engineer · Sibi

Mar 2018 – Nov 2020

• Built an event-driven ordering platform handling millions of dollars in annual revenue, using Go and a distributed data ingestion pipeline backed by Redshift.
• Led all engineering functions — from DevOps and data engineering to product delivery — scaling the team from a handful of engineers to 20+ direct reports.
• Managed engineering budget and headcount planning, and advised integration partners on modernizing their technical architectures.

Lead Software Engineer · Remarkable Health

Jan 2018 – Apr 2018

• Led a team building Node.js microservices; established CI/CD from scratch using Jenkins and deployed scalable services via Kubernetes and Helm.

Senior Software Engineer · DeMark Analytics

Oct 2014 – Jan 2018

• Built and maintained backend services for a financial analytics platform — real-time data via WebSockets, distributed messaging with RabbitMQ and Redis, and APIs across GraphQL and Express.

Senior Consultant · Neudesic

Aug 2011 – Oct 2014

• Full-stack development for enterprise clients; delivered an order and inventory management system for a large food distributor including an offline-capable Node.js solution deployed to hundreds of users.

Consultant · Sogeti

Apr 2010 – Aug 2011

• Led HIPAA 5010 compliance upgrade; built a custom X12 parser and integrated legacy systems for reliable healthcare message processing.

Education

B.S. Software Engineering Technology — ITT Technical Institute, 2010