Principal software engineer with 20+ years building internet-scale backend systems, real-time inference pipelines, and high-reliability infrastructure. Lead developer of a top anti-spam service operating a content-classification system handling 1B requests/month across 20M+ sites with sub-60ms response time and 99.99%+ accuracy.
Core Strengths
- PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript
- MySQL, Redis, Memcached
- High-throughput APIs
- Real-time inference systems
- Reliability engineering
- Performance optimization
- Production observability
- AI-assisted development
Experience
Automattic: Principal Software Engineer (1/2014 – )
I’m the lead developer of Akismet, Automattic’s anti-spam classification service that ships with WordPress. I own the full stack: feature extraction, scoring, training-data pipelines, evaluation, and rollout. We process a billion classification requests each month at 99.99%+ accuracy, all while continuously deploying new code daily.
WordPress.com: Design Engineer (11/2011 – 1/2014)
I developed customer-facing website customization features, built internal theme-development tools, and maintained the company’s CSS parser/tokenizer for ensuring secure CSS across all hosted sites.
AOL: Staff Software Engineer (08/2009 – 11/2011)
I led development of AOL’s distributed job board system and ran the full-stack development of AOL Shopping. I was a recipient of the Blue Monster Award (AOL’s highest employee honor).
Mahalo.com: Software Engineer (10/2007 – 08/2009)
I created and owned the API powering Mahalo Answers (a Python/Django Q&A product); I also contributed to the Python backend of Mahalo’s human-powered search engine.
Netscape: Software Engineer (01/2006 – 10/2007)
I was the lead engineer on the Netscape Navigator 9 browser project, managing the entire release cycle and acting as the primary contributor for new JavaScript-based browser features.
Open Source Software Projects
I’ve shipped dozens of open source projects built on my own time to hundreds of thousands of users. The first native JavaScript/TypeScript spellchecker, dozens of popular browser extensions, and software for automatic podcast clip extraction from plaintext search are some of my favorites. I’ve been writing about these projects on my personal site, chrisfinke.com, since 2006.
Education
B.S. in Computer Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 2005.