# Chris S. > Senior Software Engineer at CrowdStrike Location: Portland, Oregon, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/chriss Backend software engineer with chemistry background ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ CrowdStrike Jan 2022 – Present ### Lead Software Engineer @ Skillz Inc. Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Portland, Oregon Metropolitan Area - Orchestrated an emulator reservation workflow for a mobile cloud gaming platform, integrating with the Skillz personalization system for a controlled rollout. Services are implemented in Go, deployed in Kubernetes, and are backed by AWS DynamoDB, SNS, and SQS. - Developed a web-based MMP integration using Google Tag Manager and Next.js to track effectiveness of user acquisition campaigns targeting cloud gaming. ### Senior Backend Engineer @ Skillz Inc. Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Portland, Oregon Area - Tech lead for backend engineering team, operating in a cross-functional capacity to deliver and scale features for a competitive mobile gaming platform. - Operated in a cloud native, distributed system designed for high scalability and availability, with Java/Spring Boot microservices deployed in a combination of Kubernetes (EKS) and AWS EC2, and backed by data in RDS MySQL, DynamoDB, S3, Elasticsearch, and Redis. - Re-architected a legacy system to improve the durability, observability and speed of push notification marketing campaigns, leveraging Elasticsearch sliced scroll parallelism with AWS SQS to generate a 15x speed increase from start to finish. - Integrated the trophies feature into the personalization system, increasing tournament entry fees up to 50% during time-limited trophy events. - Led the optimization of a recurring job for writing segmentation data into Elasticsearch, doubling write throughput to ensure pipeline completion within a one hour time limit. - Designed or approved technical design documents for platform feature additions such as segmentable trophies and third party ad integrations. ### Software Engineer 3 @ Mentor Graphics Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Portland, Oregon Area - Developed a Kafka Streams app for transforming and enriching topic messages that originated from a MySQL database. Messages are serialized with Avro using the Confluent Schema Registry for compact storage. - Rewrote a specific graph-like API to use a graph DB instead of SQL, allowing queries to resolve approximately 10x faster. - Designed an architecture and migration path for an existing application to switch to a change data capture system, by reading database change events with Debezium and streaming them into Kafka for downstreams clients. - Retrofitted an application to support user defined permission groups. In addition to a database schema migration, SQL queries were modified in order to restrict content to the appropriate users. Intermediate level queries were cached and leveraged at runtime to mitigate performance impact. - Prepared a MySQL to PostgreSQL migration using pgloader, altering and consolidating column types where applicable. ### Software Engineer 2 @ Mentor Graphics Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Portland, Oregon Area - Developed a NodeJS web server for supporting real time multi-user interaction in a single page app. The server is written in Typescript using Express and socket.io, with Mocha and Chai for unit testing, and backed by a Redis store. Redis interactions are implemented using Lua scripts to minimize network traffic and guarantee atomic execution. - Consolidated and updated an existing Docker configuration by fixing bugs and updating several Bash scripts responsible for loading, saving, and migrating MySQL databases. Additionally, rewrote an existing Dockerfile to use a multi-stage build, resulting in a 33% reduction in image size. - Designed and created a microservice for selecting files out of a ClearCase repository. The server is another NodeJS/Typescript/Express combo wrapping the cleartool and rcleartool command utilities, with a Dojo dgrid UI in order to match the theme of a related application. - Participated in MECOP program as a mentor. Responsibilities included leading intern projects, instructing and teaching concepts when needed, and giving performance appraisals. - Created a feature for defining integrations with OSLC compatible microservices. This is a full stack CRUD implementation, including MySQL schema design, writing the backend models and controllers using PHP within the Zend Framework, with a React UI. - Built a suite of React components of various input types, designed to support exclusive multi-user editing backed by a socket.io server. The components wrap, and in some cases extend, open source components such as react-datetime, react-select, react-dropzone, and ckeditor, among others, in order to support a consistent API. The project also includes Redux with Immutable.js for managing state, and is compiled/bundled using Babel and webpack. ### Associate @ Schrödinger Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | Portland, Oregon Area - Designed and developed an internal website used for storing and processing data for drug discovery projects, creating references to relevant scientific publications, and organizing other related information such as legal documents. The server is written in Python using the Django framework, with a front end using a combination of jQuery and Bootstrap components. Responsibilities included schema design using a Postgres database, executing database migrations when necessary, performing the majority of backend server development, creating a unit test suite, and setting up the git development workflow for the team. - Created a browser extension for Google Chrome, used as a convenience for accessing ligand images and other information from the RCSB protein data bank. ### Intern @ Schrödinger Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Portland, Oregon Area - Scientist within the Drug Discovery Applications Group, participating in collaborations with both internal and external teams. - Developed an automated process for scheduling recurring assignments for team members. The scripts are written in Python, interacting with Google Sheets using the gspread library, and run periodically using cron. Depending on current status, required time interval, and other variables, JIRA tickets are created and assigned accordingly. - Researched and compiled data from available scientific publications and patents, with a special focus on locating ligands bound within crystallized protein structures. Chemical structures are entered into a MySQL database, then exported and prepared into .sdf or .mae files for further analysis. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Chemistry Oregon State University Jan 2005 – Jan 2009 ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science Portland State University Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cdschmitz --- Source: https://flows.cv/chriss JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/chriss/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22