Chris Kelly
Resume
Profile
Software Engineer turned manager, I deeply care about getting to the right technical outcomes, and the engineering and people machines that get us there. I have a track record of hiring, growing, and leading engineering organizations. I stay technical enough to add value in architecture discussions and individual changes.
I’m organized, systematic, and reliable. I’m often the person that speaks up about something that isn’t right, and I’ve operated enough software stacks and worked within enough engineering organizations that I’m generally bringing solutions instead of problems. I am the person to organize a group run before work, play devils advocate to any point of view, and to geek out on super technical things.
I’ve had lots of fun taking 0-5 person engineering organizations to 25+, and while I’m comfortable across the whole stack, I’m particularly strong in platform/infrastructure work.
Experience
Senior Software Engineer, Statype - 2022-2023
Employee #4 at bootstrapped pre-market-fit startup. Built infrastructure and platform from the ground up using terraform on AWS+Fivetran including CI-CD of Rails and dbt to ECS tasks/services with Event Bridge, RDS Serverless, Cognito, SES, in a single tenant architecture. Drove AWS Well Architected and 100% compliance with AWS FSBP and CIS AWS, and SOC 2 type 1. Shaped company culture including leading Mission/Vision/ Values and holistically owning Engineering delivery.
Director of Engineering, Zenput - 2020-2022
Led the ‘core’ engineering org at Zenput for 2 years. Hired managers and supported their growth including several fullstack engineering teams, a new IT/Helpdesk team, and our first Infrastructure/Automation team. Partnered with Product to deliver customer value through new functionality and supporting internal team/org growth and growth of our platform. Migrated infrastructure to code with CloudFlare/Terraform, rolled out ChatOps, and point person for operational spend. Drove resource/spend optimization including CI utilization, Instrumentation, Compute autoscaling, and Heroku/AWS/GCP. Company Acquired in 2022.
Technology General Manager, Bridgewater Associates - 2018-2020
Managed teams of software engineers including Reporting/CRM/ETL, Infrastructure, and Scala. Seamlessly migrated a large application and its supporting tooling and dev pipelines to a new cloud based container platform, and made huge strides in improving new-feature velocity for a team of 50 developers with automation and testing.
Senior Manager, Software Engineering, Salesforce Pardot - 2015-2017
Built and led the Marketing Insights program at Salesforce Pardot, including hiring 20+ engineers and product managers across 4 engineering teams. Built and launched: B2B Marketing Analytics, Customizable Reporting, Multi-Scoring, Campaign Influence Multi Touch Attribution, and Internationalization. Owned the Pardot API, Scoring and Grading, and the Google Adwords connectors.
Director of Internal Operations, Big Nerd Ranch - 2010-2014
Hired as a junior Ruby on Rails developer and employee #5 at Highgroove Studios, stepped up as a leader, and worked with the founder to grow to a 30 person consulting business. Taught classes on Agile Development and led the rapid build of MVP web applications, for startups and Fortune 100 companies. In late 2012, merged with Big Nerd Ranch. Managed the teams that owned: .com (rebuild doubled traffic to 150k/month unique sessions); Training (processed $8M+ of transactions), nerdassociation.org (realtime collab for 10k+ students in 1000+ classes); and Stable (internal ERP for 150 employees).
NOC Manager and Operations Engineer, SugarCRM - 2008-2010
Worked remotely to lead the charge to take SugarCRM’s datacenter from a patchwork of hand configuration to an automated (with Puppet), monitored, and scalable infrastructure. At exit, was leading a team of 3 with an annual operating budget of ~$600k and a 24/7 production environment.
Undergraduate and Graduate Research Assistant, Georgia Tech RNOC - 2005-2007
Led engineering on CPR: the ‘Campus-Wide Network Performance Monitoring and Recovery System’. Wrote automation, monitoring, and data-collection software for 50+ monitoring systems around the world. Built a platform that enabled researchers to run massive performance experiments, and wrote several papers on network anomaly detection.
Owner, ithought 1999-current
Owner/operator of small web hosting company. Turned one P3 tower with one website into a rack of Dell/Cisco equipment in a datacenter, into automated cloud infrastructure using Ubuntu/Git/Cloudflare/Netlify/LetsEncrypt/DigitalOcean. O(50) customers.
Additional Experience
Mentor, Everwise, GT Mentor Jackets, and others 2012-present
Volunteer mentor for College Students and budding software engineering leaders.
Board Member, Wandrer 2020—present
Startup working to encourage recreational atheletes in finding unfamiliar places
Project Manager, Gallery 2004-2014
Open Source photo sharing/hosting application
Platforms Engineering Intern, Google 2007
Network performance simulation software
CTO, CollegeMedium 2006
“Craigslist for college students” startup. Successful exit.
Security Engineer, The Fulcrum Group 2004-2006
Linux Server Administrator, WebConnect 2004
IT Manager, Georgia Tech Student Center 2002-2004
Peer Leader/RA, Georgia Tech 2002-2003
Education
Georgia Institute Of Technology — MS CS 2007, BS CS 2005
Specialized in Computer Network Performance and Observability. Minored in Public Policy focusing on the intersections of Policy and Technology. NSA Security certificate.
Self Guided
4-course business program from Wharton on Coursera with certificate AWS and Azure base certifications
Bonus Skills
Epic mountain bike adventurer. Simplifier and Organizer of all things. Occasionally published photographer. MENSA. Eagle Scout. Cellist. Connoisseur of delicious food of questionable health merits. INTJ.