Chris Simmons
Principal Engineer at Kaiba AI
Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Simmons is a Principal Engineer with 18+ years of experience designing and operating cloud-native platforms, currently leading platform work at Kaiba AI from Tauranga, New Zealand. He blends hands-on engineering and strategic leadership across platform engineering, automation, observability, and developer productivity, having built and run large-scale cloud teams and practices across fintech and cloud consultancies. Chris has repeatedly moved between individual contributor and leadership roles—scaling teams at Laybuy and Umbrellar while retaining deep technical craft—so he mentors engineers without losing sight of shipping reliable systems. Known for driving transformation and resilience, he favors pragmatic automation and measurable reliability improvements over flashy one-off projects. A quick thinker who values dissenting perspectives, he pairs a systems-engineering pedigree with a penchant for building developer-friendly platforms that reduce toil and accelerate delivery.
9 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
A-Level, ICT, Graphic Design, Mathematics, A-Level, ICT, Graphic Design, Mathematics at The College of Richard Collyer
Github Skills (71)
windows10
infrastructure10
dx10
microservices10
javascript10
linux10
desktop-application10
powershell-module10
golang10
angular10
go10
macos10
svelte10
backstage10
react10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
ekkohdev/backstage
Aug 2020 - Feb 2026
Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals
Contributions:24 pushes, 9 branches in 5 years 7 months
portalsbackstageopen-platform
ekkohnet/kubernetes
Dec 2021 - Jun 2026
Production-Grade Container Scheduling and Management
Contributions:8 pushes in 4 years 6 months
containersschedulingorchestrationdockergrade
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