Chris Ballinger
Senior IOS Engineer Tech Lead (IC4) at Dropbox
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Ballinger is a product-focused Senior iOS Engineer and Tech Lead with 15 years of experience building privacy-minded, production mobile applications from concept to scale. Based in Berkeley, he combines hands-on engineering with team leadership—mentoring engineers, managing cross-functional stakeholders, and driving iOS discipline practices at companies like Dropbox and Rightpoint. He’s a longtime open-source contributor and maintainer, with notable contributions to widely used projects such as CocoaAsyncSocket and XMPPFramework and practical expertise in CI/CD and test automation. His background includes founding ChatSecure, where he shipped a decentralized end-to-end encrypted messaging app and designed backend services handling millions of notifications. He’s fluent in both legacy Objective-C and modern Swift ecosystems, with deep interests in cryptography, privacy, and building resilient offline-capable experiences. An uncommon strength is his track record of turning research-grade security designs into user-facing products with strong test and release automation.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering at Penn State University
Stackoverflow
796reputation
21kreached
15answers
5questions
Github Skills (33)
unit-testing10
uitest10
objective-c10
xmpp10
ios10
testing10
fastlane10
xctest10
cicd10
homebrew10
xcode10
junit10
build-automation10
swift10
unit-test10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
robbiehanson/KissXML
Sep 2015 - Nov 2020
A replacement for Cocoa's NSXML cluster of classes. Based on libxml. Works on iOS.
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:13 releases, 2 reviews, 78 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris's commits primarily focus on enhancing the testing infrastructure of the project. They added new test targets for iOS and Swift, indicating an effort to expand test coverage across different platforms. The commits reveal the implementation of new tests and adjustments to existing ones, along with fixes to address compiler errors and improve test reliability, specifically related to testing the core functionality of the KissXML library. These changes involved modifying test files and ensuring compatibility with various Swift versions.
objective-cswiftiosmacoscluster
robbiehanson/XMPPFramework
Sep 2012 - Feb 2021
An XMPP Framework in Objective-C for Mac and iOS
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 10 reviews, 253 commits in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Chris upgraded the libidn library to version 1.25, removing support for armv6 and adding support for armv7s. The user also fixed a spelling error, added support for Google OAuth2, and added support for NSSecureCoding. Additional commits involved fixing the serverless demo project, and adding support for XMPP URIs (XEP-0147) and the XEP-0334 (Message Processing Hints).
objective-cxmppmacswiftios
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