Chris Kelner is a seasoned software leader and product solutions architect with 13 years of experience designing, shipping, and operating everything from monolithic backends to containerized microservices, serverless functions, and observability tooling. Based in Seattle, he now manages a team of Product Solutions Architects at Datadog, translating customer needs into reference architectures, implementation guides, and product feedback that drive adoption and product growth. He previously founded Datadog’s Demo Engineering practice—building and operating 30+ demo systems used daily by 1,800+ employees that helped generate over $800M in ARR—and has a strong track record of turning complex observability and logging challenges into repeatable solutions. Comfortable across Python, JavaScript, and Java, Chris blends hands-on engineering and DevOps craftsmanship with customer-facing technical leadership, having directly supported 400+ customers and helped secure $20M+ in net new ARR. Not obvious from titles alone, he repeatedly builds internal developer-facing platforms and self-service tools that scale teams and accelerate sales and onboarding.
13 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor Information Technology with concentration in Software Development, Bachelor Information Technology with concentration in Software Development at Clayton State University
Contributions:11 releases, 100 commits, 22 PRs in 4 months
sdk-jsaws-sdk-jsclient-sidejitjavascript
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