# Shammah Chancellor

> Experienced full stack engineer

Location: Emeryville, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/shammah

Veteran software engineer with over 20 years of experience building and operating systems across the stack, from user-facing applications to large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed infrastructure.

I specialize in tackling ambiguous, high-impact problems where correctness, reliability, and long-term system behavior matter more than short-term wins. Throughout my career, I’ve repeatedly stepped into new technical domains, ramped quickly, and taken responsibility for systems under real production constraints.

I’ve delivered software as both a senior individual contributor and a technical lead, influencing architecture, technical direction, and execution across teams. My work emphasizes sound system design, careful trade-off analysis, and pragmatic decision-making in adversarial or failure-prone environments.

I bring formal training in mathematics and physics, which I apply when reasoning about complex systems, scalability limits, and emergent behavior. I’m most effective in roles that value technical judgment, cross-team influence, and ownership of outcomes over time.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Alchemy
Jan 2024 – Present
Alchemy provides RPC access to the EVM compatible blockchains, as well as various indexing services.
- Migrated their compute resources off AWS, saving millions per year in expenses.
- Built a backup solution for rollup chains.

### Principal Engineer, Technical Lead @ Divvy Homes
Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area
Divvy Homes is a PropTech company that partners with customers to purchase the home of their dreams without a downpayment via a rent-to-own agreement. At Divvy, I began as the technical lead of the Payments and Capital Allocation team, and was later promoted to technical lead for the entire engineering team.

- Designed and implemented multiple critical systems responsible for payments, cashflow management, accounting, capital allocation, and contractual compliance. This allowed Divvy to secure their series C and D investment rounds, and access to hundreds of millions of dollars in debt capital.
- Created a framework with allowed automating complex and interdependent business critical operational workflows ensuring visibility, and error-free completion.
- Spearheaded multiple efforts to increase developer efficiency and site reliability through CI improvements, observability improvements, database normalization, TypeScript conversion, and many others.

### Senior Site Reliability Engineer @ Cruise
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
Cruise is one of the leaders in self-driving car technology. At Cruise, I was the lead SRE for the product engineering department consisting of 60 engineers. As lead SRE, I was responsible for rolling out observability tools, establishing on-call procedures, and assisting engineers in system design.

- Created an observability framework to allow metrics and log collection to be quickly rolled out across all of Cruise’s backend microservices.
- Decreased P0 and P1 outages from once a week to once a quarter, while decreasing outage duration from 10+ hours to less than 1 hour, and reducing reported errors from nearly 5 billion per week to less than 10,000 per week.

### Open Source Developer @ Bitcoin ABC
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco
Between 2017 and early 2019, I received a grant to work on Bitcoin Cash. I was a leading engineer in the community and responsible coordinating developer meetings, communicating with cryptocurrency exchanges, writing specifications, and much of the development work.

- Designed and implemented multiple new opcodes within the Bitcoin Cash scripting language.
- Developed test infrastructure used by the Bitcoin Cash developer community.

### Systems Software Engineer @ Cloudflare, Inc.
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
Cloudflare is the world leading content distribution network, web firewall provider, and DDoS protection company. At Cloudflare, I was responsible for the build, test, and deployment infrastructure, as well as the other internal developer services.

- Designed and implemented a continuous integration, release, and deployment system which used allowed developers to self-service via in-repository configuration files.

### Principal Software Engineer / Technical Lead @ Apcera
Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, CA
Apcera is a container orchestration platform which predated Docker, and Kubernetes. As Technical Lead of the Special Projects team, I had my hands on every part of the system. I was constantly juggling multiple time-sensitive projects, as well as being the engineer-of-last-resort for fixing critical bugs across the whole product.

- Designed and implemented the subsystems responsible for software defined networking, DNS-based service discovery,
layered file system, and many others.
- Built Apcera’s installer, release pipelines, and ”Community Edition.”

### Database Division Director (Lieutenant) @ US Navy
Jan 2010 – Jan 2014 | Charleston, SC
As an Navy Officer at the Navy Nuclear Power Training Command I started as a Nuclear Power Instructor. Due to my prior software engineering experience I was later made responsible of the internal software division.

- Architected and implemented a new Student Management System which resulted in me receiving the Navy Commendation Medal.
- Taught Nuclear Physics to 297 students with excellent student feedback and above average grades
- Modernized the physics curriculum to better convey material and reflect recent scientific developments.

### Undergraduate Researcher @ Laboratory for Aerosol Science, Spectroscopy, and Optics
Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 | Reno, NV
* Further developed mathematical techniques for simulating physical processes related to Fractal-Like agglomerates that occur as combustion byproducts.
* Wrote a pseudo-physical simulator (FracMAP) for fractal-like agglomerate particles in C++.
* Assisted in writing several publications on the structure and results of the C++ simulation.
* Proposed more accurate methods for estimating fractal-dimensionality of environmental soot particles based on the results of FracMAP simulator.

### Senior Programmer @ Desert Research Institute
Jan 2005 – Jan 2008
* Designed and implemented several visualization tools for an analytical data warehouse using Visual Basic.NET WinForms and T-SQL.
* Architected databases schemas for warehousing and querying large amounts of environmental data.
* Wrote Python scripts for cleansing and normalizing data from multiple scientific instruments and laboratories prior to importing to Microsoft SQL Server.
* Maintained backup and disaster recovery processes.

### Senior Programmer @ Pacific Internet
Jan 2004 – Jan 2005 | Ukiah, California
* Designed and implemented web applications to manage customer Apache web server configurations using Perl.
* Designed and wrote software using Perl to manage customer wireless account access and Quality of Service (QoS) using tc and iptables on Linux.

### Linux Systems Administrator @ Mendocino Community College
Jan 2000 – Jan 2003 | Ukiah, CA
* Operated and maintained several Linux servers.
* Wrote software to synchronize student accounts with the school class enrollment databases.
* Tutored students in software programming, and use of Microsoft Office, and Linux.

### Junior Programmer @ Mendocino Community College
Jan 2000 – Jan 2000 | Ukiah, CA
* Worked with a small team to write a learning management system for instructors and students at Mendocino Community College which was ultimately implemented at many of the campuses within the California Community Colleges System.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Physics
University of Nevada, Reno

### Certificate in Computer Science and Office Applications
Mendocino Community College


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/schancellor

---
Source: https://flows.cv/shammah
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/shammah/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-01