chris@chrismwaters:~$

$ whoami

Chris M Waters

Lead Platform Software Engineer @ First Dollar

I build cloud-native platforms, APIs, and the internal tooling that helps engineering teams ship faster. 10+ years across distributed systems, event-driven architecture, CI/CD, and observability, mostly on the back end.

cat whoami →
ls posts/
$ cat ~/.profile
role       Lead Platform Software Engineer @ First Dollar
location   Minneapolis–St. Paul, MN
focus      platforms · CI/CD · observability · developer experience
stack      TypeScript · Node.js · Kubernetes · Kafka · AWS
off-hours  homelab & self-hosting

# highlights

60%+

faster CI workflows at Mastery Logistics after fixing pipeline bottlenecks and test memory leaks

2 wks → 2 min

regression testing time at Further, through automated testing of mission-critical systems

cloud-native

led the migration of a claims processing engine to parallel, cloud-native processing on AWS

patent

co-author of a granted patent for linking tangible assets to a website or target URL

# recent posts

ls posts/ –all →