# Chris Urffer > Robotics Software Engineer Location: Somerville, Massachusetts, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/chrisurffer Software engineer with 4+ years of experience in systems software design and implementation. Experience with data engineering, robotics, and extensive Python development at RightHand Robotics. Experience with CI/CD, cloud service development, automatic release infrastructure, and enterprise application implementation at Amazon Web Services. Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, with a focus on systems programming and cloud computing, with extensive experience in C/C++. Internship developing research utilities, and contributions to a software prototype while working at a music-focused startup. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer II @ Automated Tire, Inc. Jan 2024 – Present | Boston, Massachusetts, United States ### Software Engineer II @ RightHand Robotics, Inc Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States RightHand Robotics was a robotics company that developed an automated piece-picking solution for warehouse logistics. It had deployments throughout the US, Europe, and Japan, with customers including Staples and Apotea, and integrators including Vanderlande, Element Logic, and Asetec. Responsibilities and highlights: - Developed new robot behaviors, resultant data pipelines, and debugging tools - Converted several behaviors that are part of the robot’s core control code (item mass estimation, suction cup dock calibration, item jumble) from a legacy state machine DSL to run on modern Python via asyncio, which run continuously on every robot in the RightHand fleet - Led an overhaul of the in-house testing analysis pipeline, removing redundant steps in data processing and increasing the number of tracked metrics from 3 to >10 - Maintained, improved, and added many features to a data processing pipeline. This pipeline runs continuously on all bots both in-house and in the field, processes > 100,000 cycles per day, and is consumed by several non-development teams - Advocated for the adoption of Ansible and designed and led implementation of Ansible workflows that continuously test and collect data on RightHand’s in-house fleet of 30+ robots, and also led an overhaul of internal tooling to enable this - Member of a team that designed and implemented changes needed to migrate tooling and build systems from local compute resources to Google Cloud Platform ### Software Engineer @ Watershed Bio Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States Watershed Informatics (now Watershed Bio) is developing a cloud platform for bioinformaticians to perform analyses quickly at enormous scale. Responsibilities and highlights: - Implemented new features for the Watershed Cloud Data Lab - Implemented a sandboxed R kernel and CRAN and Bioconductor repositories, one of the most highly requested features by clients - Implemented minor features and fixes for Watershed’s data provenance, S3/Azure/GCP cloud upload infrastructure, and data visualization tools - Worked with a small, tight-knit team of three engineers in a fast-paced startup environment ### Software Development Engineer @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Greater Seattle Area Amazon Web Services is a provider of cloud computing and infrastructure solutions. The Edge Qualification Platform team is a team within AWS responsible for developing tools that are used to assess the compatibility of IoT devices with AWS. Responsibilities and highlights: - Implemented new features, fixes, and operational improvements for IoT Device Tester (IDT) as a member of IoT Device Ecosystem’s Edge Qualification Platform team - Implemented various improvements for IDT release and development infrastructure, working extensively with Amazon S3, CloudFront, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, Lambda, API Gateway, QuickSight, and IAM - Triaged and resolved customer-issued tickets when on duty as team-designated oncall - Worked alongside another engineer to implement a pipeline to automatically code sign IDT - Worked alongside two other engineers to implement a local webserver-based GUI for IDT-FreeRTOS ### Teaching Assistant - Introduction to Software Development @ University of Pennsylvania Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 ### Teaching Assistant - Introduction to Computer Systems @ University of Pennsylvania Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 - Worked one-on-one to help develop students’ skill with course material - Graded assignments, projects, and exams ### Student Assistant @ Penn Libraries Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 | Greater Philadelphia Area - Assisted patrons with video and audio equipment, managed digital audio catalog, and organized and maintained extensive physical media catalog - Organized and maintained extensive physical media catalog, including 25,000 audio CDs ### Research Programmer @ The Wharton School Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 - Coordinated with Dr. David Hsu and PhD students to assist with research efforts by developing scripts and Java applets to parse and generate large datasets - Wrote a program to interface with Crunchbase API, parse and process the Crunchbase dataset of ~670k organizations, and assemble a timeline of executive-level positions and related data for each organization ### Studio Assistant @ Celebrations Design Group Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Greater Philadelphia Area - Assembled arrangements of flowers, props, and decor with a small team for display at local weddings - Organized warehouse inventory, handled arrangement packing materials for transportation, loading, and unloading, and managed cleanup and deconstruction of displays at wedding sites ## Education ### Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Engineering University of Pennsylvania ### Penncrest High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chris-urffer - Portfolio: https://urffer.xyz - GitHub: https://github.com/SimNine --- Source: https://flows.cv/chrisurffer JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/chrisurffer/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-31