San Francisco Bay Area
Senior Staff software engineer and technical leader with a focus on large-scale systems, distributed storage, and building high-trust engineering organizations. At Samsara, I joined before the first product and helped grow the company from a 10-person startup into a 3,000+ employee, $1.2B ARR public business. I led architecture and technical direction for our Platform organization (~15 teams), scaling cloud infrastructure, data systems, and developer platforms through rapid growth in customers, products, and teams. I shaped core systems and engineering practices through product/market fit, hypergrowth, and our transition into a mature, multi-product platform. Previously at Google, I was an early engineer on Spanner – the first globally distributed and strongly consistent SQL database – helping grow it from incubation (10 engineers) into a cornerstone production service with 80+ engineers and adoption across hundreds of teams. Earlier in my career, my PhD at UCLA advanced how file system consistency is modeled and demonstrated new file system consistency protocols that improve the consistency and durability of application data. Technical areas: distributed systems, large-scale infrastructure, storage systems, fault tolerance, systems software, file system consistency, networking, programming languages, open-source. Website: https://www.frostnet.net/chris/
Took intentional time to focus on family, rest, and exploration before my next long-term role.
Joined pre-product; helped grow the company from a 10-person startup to a 3,000+ employee, $1.2B ARR public business. As a principal technical steward, I led architecture, reliability, and scaling through every stage of growth. Provided architectural leadership for the Platform org (~15 teams). Worked across levels – from eng-wide architectural direction to hands-on work in critical technical challenges – to help keep the platform reliable, performant, and extensible as customer demand and engineering headcount grew, while evolving core architectures to unlock complex new product lines. Platform scope: • Infrastructure: compute, storage, time-series DB, observability, IAM, security • Features: reports, automation, API, enterprise management, release management • Experiences: web/mobile, GraphQL, device services Key contributions: Scaling core systems • Guided the evolution of telemetry ingestion/query, compute, storage, GraphQL, and APIs, supporting >10× growth in load, product surface, and engineering org size. Enabling new products • Partnered with product teams to design net-new product architectures. • Identified resulting gaps in the platform and steered infrastructure roadmaps to support novel access patterns and scale requirements. Scaling engineering operations • Primary technical leader for the company’s most severe production incidents; drove durable, systemic reliability improvements. • Built mechanisms that improved operational rigor, cross-team alignment, and long-term system health. Scaling the engineering organization • Co-developed engineering-wide design forums, architectural processes, and career frameworks that strengthened decision quality. • Co-led Staff+ community growth from ~5 to 35+ engineers, establishing programs that strengthened senior technical leadership. • Oversaw technical direction for Platform’s 6 Staff engineers and mentored across the wider org; partnered with leadership to mature team-level architecture and ops.
Led foundational engineering work across firmware, backend, and frontend during Samsara’s earliest years, delivering the highest contribution volume to the backend and frontend codebase for the company's first ~5 years. Built the fleet telematics product, OBD networking stack, data ingestion pipeline, and time-series database. Helped bootstrap early products across the full stack, established core architectural patterns, and transitioned key technical areas into dedicated teams as the company scaled from the first dozen employees into hundreds. As product lines expanded, took on broader responsibility for backend and device- and frontend-facing systems, leading designs, investigations, and cross-team efforts that improved reliability, performance, developer experience, and cost efficiency as the company scaled from early product-market fit into a multi-product platform serving a rapidly growing customer base.
With the Spanner team, developed the Spanner distributed database from prototype to core production service. I was the primary engineer behind the Spanner backup and restore service, creating the first version of the backup and restore systems, productionizing these for our first customer's performance requirements (F1, ads), extending the system to be resilient to regional outages, creating our automatic backup management system, leading the addition of tape integration, and generally scaling backup and restore from start to thousands of Google teams. I mentored four engineers to become full time core Spanner contributors, gave talks on Spanner to other teams and discussed their integration plans, and wrote parts of our OSDI 2012 best paper (later awarded SIGOPS 2022 Hall of Fame Award paper and SIGMOD 2025 Systems Award paper).
Thesis: Improving File System Consistency and Durability with Patches and BPFS Projects and publications: • BPFS: Faster and stronger consistency for file systems with byte-addressable, persistent memory. SOSP 2009. Awarded the 2020 Persistent Impact Prize in systems by the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop. http://bpfs.cs.ucla.edu • Featherstitch: Modular file system consistency. SOSP 2007, Best Paper. http://featherstitch.cs.ucla.edu/ • Libprefetch: Faster nonsequential file access. USENIX 2009. http://libprefetch.cs.ucla.edu/ • JPred: Modular and typesafe predicate dispatch in Java. TOPLAS 2009. http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~todd/research/jpred.html
Co-teaching assistant for undergrad operating systems (CS 111).