❯ whoami --verbose
Chris Christensen
I'm a platform engineer who spends most days making infrastructure boring — the kind of boring where nobody has to think about it because it just works.
Outside of work I run a couple of different projects, write about what breaks and why, and try to read at least 50 pages per day. I&aposm also a coffee fanatic that has more coffee brewing gear than I have space for, and I love spending time with my family.
Cement City, MI · UTC−5Now
2024—now
Staff Platform Engineer, remoteReduced organizational expenses by over $30,000 annually through Datadog Custom Metrics optimization while maintaining comprehensive monitoring coverage. Designed and built an API enabling developers to programmatically manage horizontal pod autoscaling, and built a proof-of-concept for Port as an internal developer platform. Created custom CircleCI orbs, integrated JFrog Artifactory with Python reference applications, and built tooling bridging Port and CircleCI to boost development velocity. Serve on cross-functional teams piloting agentic and non-agentic AI use cases org-wide, introducing Claude, Windsurf, and MCP-based tooling into engineering workflows and evaluating OpenRouter for flexible, cost-aware multi-provider LLM access. Architected a platform-wide authentication system migrating from Kong to Istio, enabling SSO via Microsoft Entra ID, and designed a dual-instance oauth2-proxy architecture solving cross-domain cookie scoping for internal and public-facing apps.
2021—24
Engineering Manager, remoteManaged two engineering teams across business units, providing coaching, one-to-ones, and performance reviews while contributing hands-on as an individual contributor. Led AWS billing consistency and cost-optimization efforts, and participated in SOX and PCI compliance auditing. Led a DevOps team through Omnivore's acquisition by Olo, collaborating across engineering, operations, and management on integration strategy, and consulted on adopting Kubernetes within Olo's legacy network while supporting Omnivore's multi-cluster Kubernetes infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible.
2019—21
Cloud Systems EngineerDeveloped MIDIGATE, a single sign-on application serving as the authentication floor for all MiHIN applications, built with React and AWS Amplify, CloudFront, API Gateway, Cognito, AppSync, and Lambda, saving an estimated $60,000/month by replacing Salesforce as the authentication and authorization platform. Built a Python-based user management API extending AWS Cognito, and developed the frontend for the File Submission module enabling healthcare organizations statewide to submit data to MiHIN's Advanced Care Relationship Service. Used the Serverless Framework to build Lambda functions across the MiHIN ecosystem, and built a backend reporting tool in Python and AWS Step Functions that delivered positive COVID-19 test results to multiple state agencies during the early pandemic.
Tools I reach for
Next.jsPythonTerraformKubernetesArgoCDPostgrestmuxClaudeCircleCIOpenRouterDataDogAWSPostHogLinuxMacOS
Mostly Next.js, Python, and Kubernetes.