Chris Kirkland
Staff Software Engineer at GitHub
Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Kirkland is a Staff Software Engineer with a decade of experience designing and shipping cloud-native systems that prioritize availability, reliability, scalability, and performance. Currently at GitHub after rising through senior technical roles, he has led authentication initiatives and shaped platform-level APIs and event-driven architectures. At IBM he led squads to modernize core services—architecting zero-downtime ETCD migrations, building IAM-to-RBAC synchronization, and implementing Prometheus-based monitoring for Kubernetes-on-Kubernetes stacks. He combines a strong applied math background (M.S. in Computational and Applied Mathematics) with hands-on systems engineering, often translating mathematical rigor into robust distributed-system designs. Based in Austin, he pairs deep backend expertise in Go and cloud platforms with a pragmatic focus on operability and feature-flag–driven rollouts. Outside work he brings discipline and focus from pursuits like cycling and triathlon, hinting at a steady, performance-oriented approach to both engineering and life.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.) Computational and Applied Mathematics, Master of Science (M.S.) Computational and Applied Mathematics at North Carolina State UniversityBachelor of Science (BS) Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (BS) Mathematics at Mercer University
English
Github Skills (94)
security10
mtls10
entitlements10
acl10
latency10
scale10
abac10
database10
rbac10
driver10
zanzibar10
sql9
grpc9
graph-database9
stress-testing9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
chriskirkland/chriskirkland.us
Jun 2016 - Feb 2021
Personal website powered by Hugo.
Contributions:3 PRs, 165 pushes, 6 branches in 4 years 8 months
hugohugo-theme
chriskirkland/go-xtract
Sep 2019 - Jan 2024
Tool for extracting strings from function calls in Go source code
Contributions:7 PRs, 18 pushes, 6 branches in 4 years 4 months
golangcallsstringsfunction-callsgo-source
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