Hi, I'm Chris.

bio

I grew up on Long Island, NY in a non-standard but very loving household with my grandparents and father. Our family owned and operated a small travel agency and I was very lucky to grew up traveling extensively, learning at a young age to appreciate how big (and small) the world is. As a big geek, I taught myself HTML in elementary school and made websites on Angelfire for anyone who would give me the time of day. Encouraged by family, I loved learning, especially enjoyed my science and history classes, and procrastinated on all of my homework. In high school, I became the editor of the school newspaper and considered going into journalism as a career. At the paper, we struggled to find a good tool to manage our articles and workflow, so a close friend and I started a company ("iWebPress") to build a CMS for small and medium-sized publications that couldn't afford the software built for the big daily newspapers. We somehow convinced dozens of clients to pay a bunch of teenagers a monthly subscription fee for our software.

At Cornell University, I studied computer science and political science, with no clear understanding how the two might intersect. After coasting by on smarts in school, I had to develop real study habits for the first time in my life. It was here that I dove into politics and activism, particularly around LGBTQ+ and labor rights and the 2008 election. I made lifelong friendships in both of my areas of focus. I studied abroad in Berlin and with all of our classes and papers in German, I was forced to rapidly improve my language skills. I stayed an additional year at Cornell to earn my Master of Engineering in Computer Science and worked on a verifiably secure online voting system, which was my first real taste that there might be a place to use my tech skills in the public sector.

dc & new york

Post-graduation, I moved to the Washington, D.C. By chance, a friend e-mailed me a job posting at the Democratic National Committee to work on a media data reporting and visualization system for President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. A small team and I built a system that far exceeded expectations, ultimately becoming responsible for all campaign data (media, field, polling, etc.). Perhaps more importantly, I met some of my closest friends in the pressure-cooker of the 2012 Obama-Biden campaign.

In 2013, I moved to New York City and got to know the city again. I co-founded a startup called Analytics Media Group with some of these campaign friends and former colleagues. We took the innovations from the campaign and built software that would allow customers to reach individuals on TV with the same precision as digital advertising. We were featured on the cover of the New York Times magazine and it brought us all 15 minutes of fame. We grew the company to around 35 employees and had Walmart, Uber, and several Democratic candidates for Senate and Governor as clients before ultimately being acquired by the Dolan family in 2016 to become 605, where I continued on staff for several years as Group VP of Tech & Engineering.

"The greatest good, for the greatest number of people, in the greatest need"

In 2015, I took a leave of absence from AMG to work at the White House as part of the United States Digital Service, a group founded by President Obama to bring private-sector technologists into government to fix digital service delivery (and institutionalize the lessons learned from the healthcare.gov rescue effort). I primarily worked to land the deeply-troubled US import system at Customs, but also touched on immigration and refugee systems, and USDS-wide projects. Working in this and subsequent positions in government were simultaneously some of my most rewarding and mindnumblingly frustrating jobs -- bureacracy presents a serious challenge to delivering good services to those who need them most. It was the privilege of a lifetime to have a front-row seat to history.

In DC in 2016, I lucked out and met my now-partner Alon. Early in our relationship, I took him to political nerd prom (aka the Democratic National Convention), where we had a chaotic and relationship-solidifying experience and I learned that he could tolerate my flavor of crazy.

san francisco

Alon and I moved together to San Francisco in 2019 for a change of scenery and to experience working "in tech" at Lyft and Salesforce respectively. I started as the engineering manager responsible for our core locations services and got first-hand experience effectively scaling some pretty complex logic to tens of millions of simultaneous users. At the beginning of 2021, I was promoted to senior engineering manager and became responsible for building an entirely new navigation and mapping experience for drivers and riders ("LyftNav" and "LyftMap"). With an incredibly talented team, we successfully built a brand new product and scaled it to 3 million rides and 26 of the top 30 regions. This was made even more challenging with a large portion of the team being based in Belarus and Ukraine. You can read much more detail about this experience above.

I took a 3 month leave to help on the 2020 Biden campaign and after much hand-wringing given how exciting the work was at Lyft, I returned to government in 2022 as a presidential appointee. Serving as the Senior Counselor for Technology, Strategy, and Delivery to the FEMA Administrator, I built a digital service team (product, eng, and design) from scratch and helped build a data team. We worked to fundamentally shift agency culture and practices to focus on customer experience and outcomes and started a multi-year effort to improve how we deliver assistance to survivors. You can read more about this experience above.

flying

In 2021 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alon and decided to move temporarily to Honolulu. Exploring the natural beauty and marine wildlife on each of the Hawaiian islands helped us make it through the pandemic with our sanity mostly intact. I also began training to become a private pilot in earnest, a goal that I had held since I was a teenager. After fits and starts, I finally earned my private pilot certificate back in the Bay Area in 2024 and have since flown family and friends on some exciting adventures (including a tour of Manhattan up the Hudson River!).

what's next

I have been thinking deeply about the meaning "impact." If the first 20 years of the Internet were full of unbridled optimism, the past 10 have shown clearly that tech has a dark side. We have seen how it can be used to manipulate, deceive, and divide us. The same platforms that were once heralded as tools for democratization and empowerment during the Arab Spring were used to spread misinformation and hate during the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. They have undermined elections and eroded civil liberties. Tools that connect us with family and friends living on the other side of the world have also fueled a mental health crisis for an entire generation.

In the end, technology is just a tool. It's on all of us in the field -- engineers, designers, product managers, researchers, data scientists, etc. -- to ensure that it is used ethically and constructively. We are not here to build technology for technology's sake. With the new administration's assault on civil-rights and the rule of law, it's even more critical that we use our skills to build technology for the public good.

Since my government service ended in January 2025, I have been enjoying time-off to travel (just got to my 6th continent!), work on personal technical projects, get my high-performance aircraft endorsement, and take technical classes as I consider my next professional adventure. In addition to tech, flying and traveling, I love skiing, photography, reading, and finding new music and movies to get excited about. If you're in the Bay and we have shared interests, give me a holler!