Shipping from bare metal up.
I'm Christopher Olsen, a principal architect who builds software at every layer of the stack, from kernels and bootloaders to cloud-native platforms serving real users.
I started writing an operating system from scratch in 2002, founded two companies, raised angel and equity financing, and shipped products people actually depended on. Today I architect enterprise-scale platform modernization across a high-traffic, multi-property live-streaming network. It is the unglamorous, high-stakes work of taking systems that grew by accretion and giving them a spine. Increasingly that work is AI-native: I built an AI code-review gate directly into our CI pipeline, where a model reviews every change before it can merge, using AI to raise engineering velocity and quality at the same time.
What ties it all together is a bias toward simple, durable systems: code small enough to read in a sitting and boring enough to trust in production. The founder's instinct to ship, tempered by the architect's instinct to make it last.
Principal Architect, Web & Platform at a high-traffic, multi-property live-streaming network (Westlake Village, CA). I'm the most senior technical individual contributor, reporting to the VP of Technology. I own the architecture of the web platforms and shared application services, plus the cross-team seams where web, chat, and video systems meet: interface contracts, integration patterns, authentication flows, and shared data. No direct reports. The leverage comes from technical judgment, architectural accountability, and still being the principal author of the platform's codebase. Right now I'm leading Project Neptune, a multi-quarter modernization consolidating 24 customer-facing surfaces onto one 13-service platform, and advising the chat and video teams on their real-time platform (~30K concurrent). I'm also bringing AI into the product itself, from real-time translation for live chat to AI-assisted image review. Before this role, as Solutions Architect, I built the platform's AI-native quality gate: a machine-review pass across four languages, followed by an AI code-review stage that blocks merges until its findings are resolved.
→ Full detail in the résumé
- 2021 - PresentEngineering Manager → Solutions Architect → Principal Architect · a high-traffic live-streaming network
- 2020 - 2021Head of Information Technology · Empower Group Partners
- 2014 - 2019CTO & Co-Founder · SpherePBX
- 2010 - 2014CEO & Lead Architect · uBix Technologies
- 2000 - PresentFounder & Owner · Domain Atlantic
- 1998 - 2001Network Administrator · Web Express · Software Engineer · Plug'nPay
"This was a tragedy and I personally don't feel that anybody should capitalize off of it."
Following the September 11 attacks, Christopher built the World Trade Center Memorial site the next day, uploading photos of the missing, victim lists, and a card of hope that collected hundreds of signatures within two hours. The site accepted no advertising.
Languages
AI-Native Engineering
Frontend
Backend & Architecture
Infrastructure & DevOps
Specialties