Christopher Gill

Principal Team Leader

Site Reliability Engineering and Cloud Operations

January 2022 - Present

Lead Cloud Operations & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), overseeing multiple teams and senior engineering leaders responsible for platform delivery, infrastructure operations, and reliability across environments, including blended teams of staff and contract engineers. Role has evolved from hands-on execution to shaping direction, strengthening senior leaders, applying AI-driven approaches to improve operational workflows, and designing systems that hold up under real world conditions as complexity grows.

• Developed senior engineering leaders through delegation of ownership, coaching, and structured accountability, enabling teams to operate independently while maintaining alignment across complex initiatives

• Anticipated the long-term friction of facility-bound infrastructure in manufacturing environments and led the migration of Bay Center Foods (BCF) to a fully cloud-based operating model, establishing one of the first cloud-native manufacturing environments and creating a scalable pattern for future deployments

• Recognized that fragmented visibility was driving reactive operations and architected a unified observability platform across Chick-fil-A’s Vertical Business Lines, enabling system-level correlation that reduced time to recovery, shifted teams toward proactive prevention, and lowered cost by an order of magnitude

• Established and scaled Site Reliability Engineering from inception, defining standards and operating models while embedding a hands-on, partner-oriented approach that improved reliability, strengthened signal quality, and reinforced ownership across engineering teams, including design and support for multi-region deployments and failover strategies

• Built and matured Cloud Operations into a highly trusted, cross-functional team by creating clarity in ownership, strengthening partnerships, and ensuring teams could operate independently without losing alignment

• Partnered with application teams supporting operator-facing systems to ensure platform capabilities, reliability patterns, and operational models aligned with business outcomes and user experience expectations

• Identified the need for consistent and scalable infrastructure delivery patterns and selected and operationalized an infrastructure-as-code platform, partnering with Enterprise Architecture to position it for broader adoption while influencing vendor roadmap and capabilities

• Owned vendor and contract engagement across infrastructure and platform domains, including SaaS vendor management, negotiation of Statements of Work, and ensuring alignment between external capabilities and internal system needs

• Influenced AWS enterprise agreement through an addendum enabling Outposts and partnered with Legal and Finance to expand cloud capabilities, improve billing clarity, strengthen budget management, and establish more predictable cost models

Cognosos, Inc

Senior Product Reliability Engineer

November 2020 - January 2022

• Brought in as the first reliability-focused engineer, extending the organization’s view of reliability beyond hardware concerns into system behavior, establishing the foundation for SRE practices and helping teams adopt a broader, reliability-focused mindset

• Saw that reactive alerting was masking deeper system issues and introduced SLO/SLI-driven monitoring, shifting teams toward earlier detection and intervention

• Identified gaps in system-level visibility and designed a metrics platform that correlated data across services, improving insight into application performance, hardware telemetry, and data integrity

• Restored confidence in system reliability by enabling teams to identify and address issues earlier, reducing reliance on customer-reported incidents and shifting ownership closer to the teams building the systems

Site Reliability Engineer III

• Defined and implemented SLO/SLI-driven site reliability practices across globally distributed systems, bringing structure to reliability in an environment where latency and real-time decisioning left little room for failure

• Supported production environments operating at global scale (2M+ requests/sec), processing and correlating large-scale identity and behavioral data across distributed systems

• Executed migration and consolidation of datacenter infrastructure following a business-driven decision to exit a facility, managing hybrid cloud constraints, minimizing service interruption, and improving workload placement, operational simplicity, and system integrity

• Identified inefficiencies in backup and disaster recovery architecture and reduced storage costs by 95% for a global identity platform while maintaining full durability and coverage across highly distributed datasets

• Served as lead SRE for the redesign and deployment of a global cross-device identity platform, responsible for guiding system design decisions for datasets operating at the scale of the global population

July 2018 - November 2020

Applied Computer Solutions

September 2014 - July 2018

Sr. Systems Engineer

• One of two initial engineers, built and led a customer-facing, fully remote engineering team, establishing working models that balanced autonomy, accountability, and direct engagement with customers

• Built network orchestration platforms for a mobile telecommunications carrier, translating complex systems into infrastructure that could be reliably operated at scale

• Architected distributed systems to manage edge networks supporting LTE and WiFi deployments, designed to operate reliably in constrained, real-world environments where failure conditions were common and recovery needed to be predictable

• Contributed to early edge 5G computing initiatives, helping shape platform capabilities in a space that was still forming, with a focus on making emerging technologies usable and operational rather than experimental

Secure Engineered Compliance, LLC.

Managing Partner

January 2012 - December 2016

• Saw utility industry compliance and safety processes were reactive, fragmented, and heavily dependent on manual tracking, and built a SaaS platform that enabled organizations to manage regulatory requirements proactively through structured data and automated workflows

• Recruited and led a team of software engineers to design and deliver a scalable, multi-tenant system, balancing product development with real-world operational needs from customers

• Improved the reliability and accuracy of compliance tracking by designing systems that connected training, documentation, and operational events, reducing missed requirements and enabling earlier intervention

Worked in a fast paced, multi-faceted, agile environment to maintain and enhance our merchant and partner facing portal used for PCI Compiance certification using a wide variety of tools and technologies including, PHP, Python, SQLAlchemy, MySQL, Nginx, Apache, and ExtJS. Created tools used to migrate our entire portfolio to our new vulnerability scanning solution that I also maintain. Acted as release manager for creating and code-reviewing weekly code releases using mercurial. Responsible for data integrity in syncing between multiple complex systems, including Salesforce.com, using SOAP and RestFull APIs. Worked with internal penetration testers to harden merchant portal against potential attacks. Collaborated with third-party, international vendors, to allow seemless integration of re-branded products to be managed from within our system. Extensivie optimizations and tuning changes to improve performance of multiple MySQL databases and queries ran against these databases.

May 2011 - September 2014

Lead Software Developer

AutoPILOT Magazine

Software Engineer

September 2009 - May 2011

Developed and administered a web application using full LAMP stack that showcased the regional AutoPILOT magazines while at the same time allowed the editors and staff to instantly update articles and news entries. Free-lance writers also were able to upload and maintain articles they had written that could then be integrated into the main site once approved. Custom ad integration that tied into the existing sales methodologies was also incorporated into the sites on a weighted round-robin basis. This application also included a custom built forum for the discussion of the various topics covered in the magazines and a social networking area that permitted pilots and aviation companies to connect with each other sharing stories, experiences, and an overall love of aviation.

PDG Enterprises, LLC.

Partner - Software Engineer

May 2009 - May 2011

Created a series of dynamic sites with the focus of promoting LED Lighting by aggreggating reviews, news, and advice from many outlets into a single place. Duties included building the three, genre specific, websites using PHP and a shared MySQL database focused on specific roles in the LED industry, and later maintenance and integration of a forum engine.

Electronic Solutions

Contractor & Consultant

May 2005 - May 2009

As an independent contractor, duties included building diverse websites that range from simple and informative, to highly complex and dynamic, database-driven web applications built using PHP and MySQL. Services also include professional consultations relative to budget and interview coaching regarding third party web and technology firms.

Independently mapped erosion of Shoal Creek and deployed automated data collection sites to collect information used to correlate stream depth and flow as compared to weather fluctuations. Created standalone software using MATLAB that automated comparisons between data collected from the various sites along the stream against weather stations on the property for both atmospheric pressure and precipitation.

Data Collection and Analysis

Griffin Experiment Station

May 2006 - August 2006