Chris Livingston

New York, New York, United States

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Chris Livingston is an engineer-founder with 11 years of experience building and scaling backend systems and GTM-facing technical motions across startups and large platforms. He helped power products used by over 150M DAU at Twitter, led cross-company migrations (Python 2 → 3), and extended the Pants build system for ML workflows—contributions visible in notable open-source projects like pants and pex. Currently focused on GTM/deployed engineering, he blends pre-sales technical leadership with hands-on systems work to win enterprise deals and accelerate product adoption. Chris has founded a bootstrapped marketplace, driven ARR wins through technical validation at Algolia, and led GTM engineering at early-stage security and fintech startups. Comfortable across Golang, Python, Scala, AWS/GCP and modern web stacks, he uniquely pairs deep backend expertise with customer-facing problem solving. Outside work he plays guitar in NYC and Nashville bands, reflecting a creative drive that influences his product and team leadership.

11 years of coding experience

8 years of employment as a software developer

High School, High School at De La Salle High School

Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Dartmouth College

English, Spanish

Github Skills (12)

build210

build-system10

build-tools10

python-packaging10

pytest10

python10

dependency-resolution10

build-automation9

testing9

command-line-interface8

command-line8

cli8

Programming languages (4)

TypeScriptC++GoPython

Github contributions (5)

pantsbuild/pants

Oct 2017 - May 2019

The Pants Build System

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:32 commits, 35 PRs, 3 pushes in 1 year 6 months

Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on improving the Pants Build System, specifically related to Python build and execution tasks. Their commits addressed issues with the PEX_PATH environment variable in the `./pants run` command, ensuring proper runtime context for applications. Furthermore, they contributed to enhancing interpreter selection based on target-level constraints and integrated a Python distribution task for handling user-defined `setup.py` scripts. They also tackled bugs related to interpreter selection and platform compatibility when dealing with Python targets without sources and native extensions.

pythonprotobufaws-lambdapantsshell

pex-tool/pex

Sep 2017 - Oct 2018

A tool for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files, lock files and venvs.

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:11 commits, 12 PRs, 61 comments in 1 year

Contributions summary:Chris primarily worked on enhancing the functionality of the `pex` tool, which generates executable Python files. Their contributions focused on improving the handling of PEX_PATH, adding interpreter constraint options, and implementing a blacklist for skipping certain requirements during the resolution process. These changes involved modifying the core `pex` library and its bootstrapper, expanding its capabilities, and addressing specific integration challenges related to interpreter selection and dependency resolution.

executablepexpython

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