Hi, I’m Chris Smith. I live in San Francisco, California and do software, startup and mindfulness things.
Most recently, I was an engineering manager at Uber. I joined the company in 2014 as an engineer, and was a manager and individual contributor in the data engineering and developer experience organizations. My data engineering team of 15 people was responsible for Uber’s primary realtime business intelligence pipeline, and scaled backend systems and data products through several years of Uber’s aggressive business and employee growth. In developer experience, I managed development of tools and frameworks for Go and Java developers, and led cross-company initiatives to scale development processes for over 4000 engineers.
Before Uber, I was a full-stack engineer at Circa, and lead software developer at Gremlin Social.
My educational background in computer science consists of a B.S. (2010) and M.S. (2011) with an emphasis in distributed systems from Webster University. I also hold a B.A in psychology, completed in 2003. Before college, I attended St. Louis Priory School.
Areas of my expertise and interest in the industry include:
- Distributed systems and databases
- Data engineering, infrastructure and real-time analytics
- Machine learning and natural language processing
- Architecture, frameworks and scalable engineering practices
- Mentorship, management, personal and organizational growth
I develop and maintain several open-source software projects.
I am a Buddhist and daily practitioner of meditation and mindfulness. While at Uber, I co-founded and grew a cross-company meditation and mindfulness practice group with hundreds of participants across multiple offices and states. I believe mindfulness and emotional intelligence are key qualities of effective leaders.
Outside of work, I spend much of my time working on personal software projects, writing, reading books, taking classes, meditating and practicing yoga. I gravitate towards history, science fiction, psychology and philosophy. I have passionate interests in the intersection of the human mind and technology, and how we can build software products and teams with healthier, more positive effects on engineers and society.