Christopher Williams
🏠 Rochester, New York, United States 📫 chris.a.williams@gmail.com ☎️ 585-797-4457 📄 https://linkedin.com/in/christopher-williams-513a7a2
Experience
Amazon
Software Development Engineer II
May 2021 - Present
- Proactive Self-Service Campaigns on Alexa devices
- Expanded Self-Service Campaigns for Alexa from Device Notifications to include Home Cards as a new channel
- Reaching millions of customers with proactive Book recommendations on evergreen campaigns
- Improved performance and stability of scheduled delivery notifications to significantly increase throughput during fan-out (500 tps to 5000 tps)
- Implemented initial profanity/content sensitivity guardrails for campaign contents
- Expanded Self-Service Campaigns for Alexa from Device Notifications to include Home Cards as a new channel
- Lead technical Point of Contact for Books customer experiences within Alexa Shopping
- Fixed end-to-end tests that were failing within our services and across shared partner services that required manual validation on at least weekly basis, eating up ops/on-call time
- Expanded support for Audible audiobooks within Alexa Shopping to Brazil marketplace
- Coordinated changes across partner services and teams to dial up audiobook experiments
- Improved developer/operations experience internally within team
- Drove CI pipeline improvements to reduce manual interventions/approvals
- Integrated notifications across Chime/Slack for code reviews, pipeline status, on-call tickets
- Integrated code reviews with issue tracking to link together issues for tracking purposes and automated workflows
- Reduced weekly on-call load from two SDEs to one
Axway
Principal Software Architect II
Jan 2016 - May 2021
- Significant performance improvements in Eclipse-based IDE for API Gateway
- OSGI-specific classloader fixes and improved algorithms for topological sorting and cycle detection of policy graph(s) leading to reduction of load times for complex customer projects from minutes/hours down to seconds
- Architectural changes/improvments for handoff of Titanium to open source community
- Hosting assets via Github release, updating CLI
- Replacing https://docs.appcelerator.com with new updated doc website at https://titaniumsdk.com
- Extending build/CI to use Github runners
- Lead Engineer for iOS, Android, and Windows SDK platforms for Appcelerator Titanium - both in JavaScript and each platform's native language (Obj-C, Java and C++, respectively).
- Wrote custom test framework and suite for automated testing of Titanium SDK APIs and native modules across iPad/iPhone simulators and devices; macOS Catalyst apps; Android emulators and devices; Windows Phone emulator and Universal Windows apps.
- Automated build/release of SDK, native modules, and dozens of npm packages
- Automated and updated doc generation and conversion process from Confluence to legacy JSDuck website and new Vue/Markdown replacement
- Generated custom tooling to lint API docs to help enforce API consistency; additional scripts to generate automated API tests from API docs; rewrote legacy build process from Python scripts to Node.js based JavaScript.
- Instituted and maintained a ~25 node Jenkins-based CI/CD infrastructure, maintaining child nodes with custom chef cookbooks. Evolved CI nodes to use newer/varying versions of Xcode/Visual Studio/Android SDK/NDK. Automated setup/configuration of build nodes from scratch OS versus special manually maintained single build box.
- Drove usage and enforcement of code quality, formatting, linting and developmental tools using clang-format, danger.js, eslint, husky, lint-staged, commitizen, etc.
Appcelerator
Engineering Tech Lead
Sep 2012 - Jan 2016 (3 years 5 months)
- Tech lead for the Studio IDEs: Appcelerator, Titanium, and Aptana.
- Initial implementation of Hyperloop for Android - exposing native (Java) Android & 3rd party APIs to Titanium SDK's JS environment.
- Lead engineer responsible for adding Windows Phone and Desktop SDK support to Appcelerator Titanium's supported platforms.
- Worked cross-product on Studio, Android SDK, iOS SDK, and Windows SDKs.
Senior Software Engineer
Jan 2011 - Aug 2012 (1 year 8 months)
Senior developer on Appcelerator, Titanium, and Aptana Studio products - IDEs built on top of Eclipse with varying branding and toolsets offered (for languages such as JS, Ruby, PHP, Python).
Aptana
Senior Software Engineer
May 2007 - Jan 2011 (3 years 9 months)
- Solo developer on Aptana RadRails - a Rails-focused IDE built on top of Eclipse and Aptana Studio, which added Ruby language support and tooling.
- Rewrite of Aptana Studio for v3 adding custom git support
- Initial POC of backend service for on-demand cloud hosting
Education
Rochester Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science
Skills
Java / TypeScript / JavaScript / Ruby / Obj-C / Groovy / C++ / Object Oriented Design / Git / Eclipse / OSGI / REST / Agile Methodologies / Scrum / Software Development / Amazon Web Services / Large Langauge Models (LLMs) / Alexa