Hey there! I'm Chris Williams. I'm a senior software engineer working for Atlassian. I love Neovim and NixOS.
Language-wise, I've got strong recent experience in NodeJS and Typescript on the backend, and I've also professionally used Python, C#, Java and more.
More generally I'm fluent in most of the main AWS services such as DynamoDB, S3, EC2, and more. I've built and maintained scalable microservices, with experience across the backend and frontend.
I'm also a proud daddy of a baby girl named Ellie!
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer @ Atlassian (Apr 2020 -> Today)
I currently work within the Ecosystem Deployments team at Atlassian. We own the experience of deploying Forge apps - the in-product app experience for third-party developers and internal integrations. As part of the role, I've:
- Led a 5-engineer team through a 6-month migration to deploy customer applications in a tenant-isolated fashion, establishing the foundation for a cell-based architecture and unblocking adoption for Atlassian's largest enterprise customers.
- Architected and demonstrated a migration path for deployment infrastructure to Temporal, ensuring durable, observable execution and defining a core part of the team's technical roadmap for 2026.
- Championed developer productivity principle of small pull requests, including speaking on scoring pull request complexity and its effect on cycle time at Gradle DPE Summit 2024 in San Francisco.
- Redesigned the DynamoDB schema for the Forge app discovery database, architecting a solution projected to reduce infrastructure costs by more than 50%.
- Spearheaded a major technical debt reduction initiative by migrating the 20-year-old legacy "UPM" flow into the centralized AdminHub, unlocking significant enterprise features.
- More generally, I have mentored numerous graduates and interns across multiple projects, with a particular focus on clean coding practices and an incremental approach to engineering.
Skill profile
Distributed Systems, Microservices, Scalability, Typescript, AWS (DynamoDB, EC2, S3, etc.), Relational DBs incl. PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Terraform, React.JS
Engineering Team Lead @ Escrow.com (2017 -> 2019)
I led a team of engineers working on constant improvements to the site and its backend services. Notably, I led the development of the first iteration of the modern Escrow Platform API. I also led the migration of the Microsoft SQL Server database to support unicode, an involved process that involved scripts, safeguards, and detailed change management.
Skill profile
Microservices, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Python, React.JS, REST APIs, Distributed Systems, .NET Framework, C#
Software Engineer @ Escrow.com (2016)
I started my career as a full stack developer from backend work (mainly C#, Python and SQL Server) to frontend work (ReactJS).
Education
BE in Mechatronics Engineering @ University of New South Wales (2010-2015)
Graduating with First Class Honours, I found my core strength was in software development, excelling in computer science elective courses and automation involving MATLAB and C++.