Kristopher Chambers

Empower Delivery (Remote) (empower.delivery)

Senior Software Architect (Apr 2023 - present)

Software Architecture and Engineering

• Architected and implemented a real-time delivery tracking system for the Empower Delivery platform. This system provides real-time tracking of delivery drivers, packages, and delivery status to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Architected and implemented a discounting system based on dynamic rules-engine based architecture, resulting in a greater degree of flexibility and accuracy, than the existing conditional-based discounting system.
• Architected integrations with multiple third-party DSP Services to provide real-time tracking and dispatching of delivery drivers and packages.
• Architected integrations for multiple third-party ordering aggregation platforms, enabling us to deliver optimal value to each individual customer.
• Spearheaded the architecture and implementation of a sophisticated multi-tenant fulfillment management and ordering management systems. This system played a pivotal role in equipping Empower Delivery to seamlessly onboard new major clients, utilizing an innovative business model that revolutionized operations within the restaurant industry.
• Successfully managed the end-to-end development process, collaborating directly with both the vendor's and the in-house engineering teams.
• Created comprehensive documentation for the applications, infrastructure, and the development process.
  • Detailed guides on application setup, development, deployment, and maintenance.
  • Comprehensive architectural documentation covering application features and systems

Rume Health / Covid Clinic (Remote) (rumehealth.com, covidclinic.org)

Software Architect (Apr 2022 - Dec 2022)

Architecture, DevOps, Backend API Development

• Developed a real-time queuing and matching system to efficiently distribute telehealth patients to the active pool of medical providers. This system achieved low patient wait times and ensured a fair distribution of patients across the provider pool.
• Architected and implemented the synchronization of data between the CRM & LIS vendor and our data warehouse and analytic platforms.
  • Designed the database schema(s) for the data warehouse and created the CSV schema(s) used by the vendor for exporting the data.
  • Designed and implemented the AWS infrastructure, ensuring adherence to best-practice security protocols and maintaining HIPAA compliance.
  • Successfully managed the end-to-end development process, collaborating directly with both the vendor's and the in-house engineering teams.
  • Fully documented the end-to-end synchronization process, including the CSV and database schemas, AWS infrastructure, and security protocols. These comprehensive documents were extensively utilized by both the vendor's and the in-house engineering teams.
• Orchestrated the synchronization of data from multiple application databases and the data warehouse into a centralized data lake by leveraging AWS Redshift and AWS DMS.
  • Collaborated with various stakeholders to ensure that the data lake met the specific requirements of each stakeholder, while maintaining strict adherence to HIPAA compliance and implementing best-practice security protocols.
• Architected and implemented an event-based system to seamlessly transfer data from the CRM & LIS vendor to the telehealth platform. This was achieved by leveraging AWS EventBridge, AWS SQS, and AWS Lambda, with a Python Chalice application.
  • Designed the JSON event schema(s) for the events, ensuring that all the necessary data required by the telehealth platform to process each event was provided.
  • Designed and implemented the AWS infrastructure, ensuring adherence to best-practice security protocols and maintaining HIPAA compliance.
  • Successfully oversaw the end-to-end development process, collaborating directly with both the vendor's and our in-house engineering teams.
  • Thoroughly documented the end-to-end synchronization process, including the event schemas, AWS infrastructure, and security protocols. These comprehensive documents were extensively utilized by both the vendor's and the in-house engineering teams.
• Created comprehensive documentation for the applications, infrastructure, and the development process.
  • Comprehensive overviews of application architecture and infrastructure.
  • Detailed guides on application setup, development, deployment, and maintenance.
  • Comprehensive documentation covering application features and systems

ClusterTruck (Remote) (clustertruck.com)

Senior Software Engineer (Apr 2021 - Present)

Architecture, Site-Reliability and Backend API Development

• Pitched and implemented multiple "feature" environments. Leveraging the existing Kubernetes infrastructure the environments could be both easily bootstrapped and easily reset back to a default state. This gives multiple teams, developing features in parallel, the ability to test and present new features in isolation on a production-like environment without disrupting the production workflows.
• Designed and developed a "Monetary Transaction" system for recording real money transactions to unify and simply refunding and the in-house accounting process.
• Architected and lead development on a monthly subscription system, "Big Cookie Club", which leveraged Stripe for credit card payments and invoicing, and the "Monetary Transaction" system for transaction history and accounting.
• Architected, and lead development on an "Account Balance" system that gives users the ability to store arbitrary amounts of money that can then be used to purchase items in the future. This leveraged the "Monetary Transaction" system for transaction history and accounting.
• Designed and developed an API for generating, purchasing, and redeeming in-house gift cards. This API leveraged Stripe for credit card payments, the "Account Balance" system for storing the money redeemed from the gift card, and the "Monetary Transaction" system for transaction history and accounting.
• Debugged Sidekiq jobs were lost due to a combination of Redis/network connectivity, Redis connection configurations, and Sidekiq's usage of Redis's BRPOP. Implemented a multi-strategy approach to tracking, alerting, and re-queuing to ensure the service was reliable. Leveraged Sidekiq enterprise's upgraded push and fetch strategies along with a custom implementation to ensure jobs that did fail to be processed did not get lost and would be re-run in a known timeframe.

Freelance

Senior Software Engineer (Apr 2019 - Present)

Application development and consulting

• Playful (creativersegame.com) - Senior DevOps Engineer
  • Providing operational knowledge to the remaining Creativerse team.
  • Performing maintenance, upgrades, deployments, and handling incident reports.
• Warm-Up (sendwarmup.com) - Senior Ruby On Rails Engineer
  • Refactored the Ruby On Rails backend to provide the team with a more maintainable application.
  • Wrote a suite of RSpec unit tests bringing the application up 0% to 100% test coverage.
• Diagnotes (diagnotes.com) - Senior Ruby On Rails Engineer
  • Provided consultation on performance implications and improvements for their Ruby On Rails backend API
  • Improved page load times, database query performance, and greatly reduced the overall number of database requests per page.
• GemGuide (app.gemguide.com) - Senior Engineer
  • Oversaw and completed the upgrade of a legacy Node.js application.
  • Set up a C/I Pipeline on Heroku and upgraded the legacy stacks.

Playful Studios (playfulstudios.com)

Server Architect (Remote) (Sept 2019 - Jan 2020)

Architecture, Platform API Development, Cloud Service Integrations.

• Unreleased Title - Server Architect
• Architected and developed a service-based platform for Playful Studio's upcoming and existing game titles.
  • Evaluated multiple PaaS, SaaS, and off the shelf solutions for game backends.
    • Worked directly with the CTO to generate a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria.
    • Provided cost-benefit analysis and operations cost documentation.
  • Developed Service templates, libraries and test suites, in both Ruby and Golang to enable the engineers to quickly create a service and integrate it with the existing infrastructure.
  • Worked with the engineering team to develop a suite of test harnesses to test the full life cycle of a game.

Principal Software Engineer (Remote) (Sept 2015 - Aug 2019)

Site Reliability, Rails Backend API Development, Cloud Service Integration, and DevOps

• Creativerse (creativersegame.com) - Principal Software Engineer
• Developed and implemented engineering, deployment, operational and testing practices enabling the team to operate a globally distributed top 50 Steam MMO game with minimal monetary and resource costs.
  • Implemented a continuous improvement pipeline through Github and TravisCI, to continually deploy Rails API changes out to beta testers on our pre-release environment.
  • Taught automated testing, API development, configuration management and operational best practices one on one with game-play engineers helping them to become proficient at operating a massively multiplayer online game.
  • Implemented alerting and monitoring to keep all team members apprised of the service health while only bubbling up actionable items to critical alert channels.
  • Wrote a comprehensive set of documentation providing technical and non-technical team members with an operational playbook consisting of;
    • Application architecture, infrastructure, and service provider information.
    • Policies and procedures for handling infrastructure, network and application outages.
    • Application setup, maintenance and deployment processes.
    • Escalation procedures and on-call rotations
• Developed a multi-cloud deployment tool giving any team member the ability to provision and deploy game servers to any of 7 supported cloud providers across 5 global regions.
• Lead planning and implementation of the Creativerse backend and client services on the Tencent Cloud platform.
  • Developed an infrastructure plan that allowed us to deploy the game to Tencent's cloud platform and begin the initial approval process in less than 4 months with 1 DevOps engineer and 2 game-play engineers.
  • Developed SDKs in Ruby and C# for various Tencent Cloud services and WeGame Platform feature, including CCS(container Server), COS(Object storage), and CVM(Cloud machines), Authentication and IAP Purchasing. This gave us the ability to easily integrate them into the client, game server, API and the provisioning service.
  • Containerized the Rails API and Elasticsearch using Docker and deployed them to Tencent Cloud's CCS service to alleviate the additional operational overhead of provisioning and running these services.
  • Worked directly with Tencent's engineers to implement changing requirements throughout the various government approval processes.
• Worked directly with a team of 3 game-play engineers to develop features with interactions between the Unity game client, Rails API, and C# game servers giving us the ability to quickly iterate on full-stack features.

Freelance

Full-Stack Software Engineer (Aug 2012 - Sept 2015)

Application development and consulting

• Playful (playfulcorp.com) - Full-Stack Engineer
  • Implemented client caching and asynchronous workflows through a job system to reduce the requests per connected client from 5 requests per minute to less than 1 request per minute.
  • Instituted testing practices on the Rails API and built out a complete test suite using RSpec unit and integration test giving us greater confidence and faster iteration speeds.
  • Improved the game client to Rails API interactions using REST practices and defensive programming techniques, lowering the API and client error rates and greatly improving maintainability and the overall user experience.
  • Developed a Ruby SDK for the Steam platform API replacing a set of untested one-off scripts which allowed us to quickly iterate and more easily maintain our Steam API integration.
• Mineral City Cabinet Company - Full-Stack Engineer
  • Developed an e-commerce application for marketing, quoting and ordering customizable drawer boxes.
• Codafish - Full-Stack Engineer
  • Lead development of a sales and CRM platform for music teachers.

Fastest Forward

Partner / Software Engineer (Feb 2009 – Aug 2012)

Application development and consulting

• Words with Friends (www.zyngawithfriends.com) - DevOps Engineer
  • Working with a small team over the course of several months we scaled the Rails backend and infrastructure from 75,000 RPM to over 1,000,000 RPM, supporting 10s of millions of active users.
  • Implemented metrics collection for InnoDB which was utilized to optimize MySQL query and cache performance.
  • Optimized MySQL query performance, cache performance, and the structure of the data to support hundreds of thousands of CPM.
  • Estimated database hardware requirements and worked alongside a team at Percona to optimize our MySQL cluster.
  • Developed and implemented object caching methods for the Rails API application to hit a P99 latency value of below 50ms.
  • Performed code reviews for the feature teams in the context of scaling, performance, and data consistency.
  • Implemented an account merge system allowing users to merge their iOS and Facebook accounts.
• InstrumentalApp (instrumentalapp.com) - Full-Stack Engineer
  • Developed a time-series data store on top of a sharded MongoDB cluster.
  • Designed and built the Rails frontend application and time series API.
  • Developed the front-end javascript for graphing and user interactions using jQuery and D3.js.
• RewardSnap - Rails/iOS developer
  • Developed a Rail API for storing and accessing a user's rewards cards and coupons.
  • Worked with a small team to develop an iOS application for storing and accessing your reward cards and coupons.
• Chacha - Full-Stack Engineer
  • Worked along with a small team on an aggressive timeline to build Chacha's anonymous question and answer site Chacha.me.
• Lazarus Software - Full-Stack Engineer
  • Lead Rails development of the web-based MMORPG Dark Curse.
• The Odyssey Newspaper - iOS/Rails Developer
  • Developed a Rails backend API and admin for delivering news and ads to the iOS application.
  • Designed and built an iOS newsreader app that consumed the backend Rails API.
• Brady Games - iOS Developer
  • Worked with a small team to develop an iPad app to purchase and view Brady Game's strategy guides.
• FatStax - iOS/Rails Developer
  • Optimized SQLite search performance of large product catalogs on the iPad.

Dealerflow

Software Engineer (Remote) (March 2008 – Nov 2008)

Rails web application development

• Dealerflow - Software Engineer
  • Developed browser-based chat in javascript over jabber with rich presences and SMS integration.
  • Built a web-based email system in Rails backed by Postfix.
  • Worked with a small team to develop a blogging, calendar, and HR Management system.

Freelance

Software Engineer (April 2007 – March 2008)

Application development and consulting

• College Matching Services - Rails Developer
  • Developed a Ruby On Rails application to match prospective students to a college based on their interests.
• Lazarus Software (darkthrone.com) - Rails Developer
  • Worked directly with the product owners to improve the performance and reliability of their web-based MMORPG Dark Throne.