Chris Mowforth
Distributed systems engineer and technical leader, 20 years in. I've owned the full lifecycle of storage and infrastructure systems inside startups that cumulatively exited for $100M+, and I've been the person people look to under pressure: an acquiring PE firm's diligence team, a query engine that has to hold up under 10x growth, or a cloud bill that has to come down by six figures without breaking anything.
Experience
CTO
Hardpoint Labs
Building a SaaS infrastructure platform (tenant isolation + a proprietary open-source database), working directly with design partners on the storage and platform architecture.
Chief Architect
Catenda
Owned platform and storage architecture end to end; re-architected and led implementation of the core storage engine (built on OpenZFS from its first iteration, still in production today), delivering industry-leading response times and an order-of-magnitude improvement in reliability. Reduced annual cloud infrastructure costs by $150–200k through storage and infrastructure optimization.
Sole technical lead through due diligence for a ~$50M PE acquisition, including defensibility of the storage architecture under investor scrutiny.
Co-founder
TupleStream
Co-founded a SaaS platform for log management and distributed tracing on Kubernetes (Rust, Swift, Golang); owned all storage and architecture decisions.
Senior Software Engineer (Contract)
Synchronoss
Maintained a mature Java codebase through a Kubernetes transition; migrated services from Spring to Spring Boot.
Senior Technical Lead
Web Summit
Owned infrastructure reliability for a live, high-stakes conference environment. Replaced hand-rolled deploys with Kubernetes-based CI/CD, cutting deployment time from hours to minutes and lifting in-conference uptime from <85% to >99%.
Senior Software Engineer
Jet.com
Built the initial service consolidating carrier data between Jet and Walmart (F#, Kafka); also carried Dev Ops responsibilities.
Various Titles
Logentries
7th engineering hire. Designed and built a log-structured filesystem on top of NFS and OpenZFS, plus a proprietary query language and execution engine over it. Led several iterative redesigns of the storage layer that accommodated 10x+ growth in ingest and search volume. Also evaluated Ceph and Gluster as alternative approaches during this period. Acquired 2015 for $68M.
Software Engineer (Contract)
Dell
Sole engineer building Dell's prototype logging service (Flume, HBase, Solr Cloud) in the Cloud R&D lab; hit all defined SLOs in the first version.
Software Engineer (Contract)
Susquehanna Ireland Ltd
Built exchange and messaging connectors (Tibco, C#) for a trading tools team — early exposure to low-latency, high-reliability financial infrastructure.
Software Engineer (Contract)
Eveve Software Ltd
Ported the company's core proprietary C-based virtual machine from Windows to Linux.
Software Engineer (Contract)
FX Capital Group
Built a B2B currency-trading platform (JRuby, Rails, Mac Ruby).
Software Engineer
Rawnet
Ruby on Rails development for a range of clients; owned deployment automation and sysadmin.
Software Engineer
FST Group
Web developer in an ad agency; led the team's transition from PHP to Ruby on Rails.
Skills
OpenZFSCephGlusterNFSlog-structured storage designstorage engine design & implementationLinux storage internalsperformance tuningdistributed systemsKubernetes-integrated storagecapacity planningincident response & resolutionautomation/toolinglow-latency system designhigh-throughput system designlock-free concurrency patternsnetworking under loadGolangRustJavaClojureF#SwiftTypeScriptShell scriptingRubyC#CI/CDparsersstreaming algorithms
Selected Outcomes
Catenda
designed and built the company's core storage engine (now Invar); order-of-magnitude reliability improvement, industry-leading response times, and $150–200k/year in cloud cost reduction.
Logentries
designed and built a log-structured filesystem on top of NFS, plus the query language and execution engine that ran over it; iteratively re-architected storage to absorb 10x+ growth in ingest and search volume. Acquired by Rapid7 for $68M.
Ported LMAX's Disruptor library to Swift
Apple themselves have used this internally.
Also Fluent In
Additional Languages and Tools
Java (incl. low-level bytecode generation), Clojure, Ruby, C#, Rust, TypeScript, Golang — plus the usual systems-programming toolkit: parsers, streaming algorithms, Linux I/O internals, networking, CI/CD, shell scripting.