# Christopher Zorn > Automating things Location: Alameda, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/christopherzorn Experienced software engineer with an enjoyment for creating and delivering solutions by using feedback from team members, maintainers and users. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Apella Jan 2024 – Present ### Staff Software Engineer @ Flexport Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco Bay Area Flexport is a full-service global freight forwarder and logistics platform using modern software to fix the user experience in global trade. Currently technical lead on two teams focused on developer productivity and infrastructure. Automating the creation of easy to change and operate software workloads with the goal of increasing developer velocity and software composability. Using Backstage templates we create paved path workflows, frameworks and runtimes for building and deploying software. Migrating ECS deployments into EKS cluster workloads and micro-services transitioning the company to a GitOps approach and Argo CD. Driving automating and boosting quality and developer velocity by improving the feedback loops during unit, functional, contract and integration testing. Using in-house tools, gradle, mirrord, and Bazel. Cataloging software components, APIs, documentation and resources to better manage maturity, life cycle and migrations. Creating Github workflows and actions to use in templates and pipelines for engineering teams. Improving the development and testing environment(s) for engineers by reducing complexity, cost and ease of use. Migrating Buildkite pipelines and workflows to Github workflows and actions. Using Bazel build farm for local and pipeline concurrency and caching for improving bazel build and test feedback loops ### Senior Software Engineer @ Zillow Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Zillow Group is a real-estate company with many brands and products. It is known for its core product Zillow.com Improved developer velocity and productivity by building continuous integration and delivery solutions for many of the company's brands and products using Python, Golang, and Gitlab. Automated testing solutions to better service predictability and management using Python, Pytest, Javascript, Bash, Locust and Golang. Engineered cluster and service catalogs and tools for managing and deploying a platform and its services using Golang and Kubernetes. Developed a workload run-time platform for Zillow Group software developer groups to handle their solutions and products using Kubernetes and a collection of open source and in-house operators and services. ### Software Engineer @ June Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area * Building real-time communication services between Appliance and Companion applications using Python, gRPC, Redis and Tornado. * Implementing data analytics collection and processing from ovens using Python, Tornado, Protobufs, Logstash, Amazon Lambda, Dynamodb, Kafka, Elasticsearch and Graphite. * Handling and processing real-time events, images, video and data from appliances to provide data to applications for users and business using Python, gRPC, Kinesis, Lambda, and dynamodb. * Building Amazon skill for Alexa interaction with June Ovens. * Implementing a recipe application server and "cook programs" service for appliances and companions using Python, Flask, Redis, Celery, SQLAlchemy, Postgresql. * Building automated testing and bench marking for analyzing and testing june services using Python, statsd, elasticsearch, and mzbench. * Implementing Authentication and Authorization for June devices and subscriptions using Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Postgres and gRPC. * Automating continuous integration, delivery, deployment and service scaling using Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Python. ### Platform Engineer @ Machine Zone, Inc. Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto * Implemented and maintained platform services used by Machine Zone's games. * Platform services helps run Game Of War: Fire Age one of the top grossing and played MMOs * Platform can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous game players that generate millions of messages. * Implemented next generation messaging system. * Implemented core technologies in Erlang and C. * Implemented test framework for behavior, integration, and benching platform's services using Erlang, Behave, and Python. * Implemented continuous deployment mechanisms for the platform services using Go.cd, Docker, Internal Cloud service, Ansible, Make and Python. * Maintained chat, real-time translation, pubsub, timer (server side deferreds), and messaging services that use Erlang. ### Platform Engineer @ Mochi Media Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 * Lead the engineering team in implementing and maintaining the Mochi API platform which includes advertising, distribution, analytics, game data storage, achievements and scores. * Platform handles over 80 million unique game plays per month. * Ad server handles over 30 million ad requests per day. * Platform is a mix of technologies that include erlang, nginx, actionscript, python, postgresql, mnesia, riak and HBase. * Designed and implemented data processing and analytics backend for handling advertiser's, publisher's, developer's and Mochi's data. * Created and delivered new advertising services. ### Co-Founder and Software Engineer @ Collecta Jan 2008 – Jan 2011 Designing and implementing real time products, namely search, using XMPP. These products are implemented in erlang, javascript and python. ### Programmer @ Blue Ion, LLC Jan 1999 – Jan 2009 ### Systems Programmer @ Chesspark Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 A programmer for chesspark.com, an online chess community. ### Researcher @ MUSC Jan 2000 – Jan 2007 ## Education ### BS in Computer Science College of Charleston ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/christopher-zorn-40b3461 - Portfolio: http://blog.thetofu.com - Portfolio: http://mochimedia.com - Portfolio: http://butterfat.net --- Source: https://flows.cv/christopherzorn JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/christopherzorn/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10