Chris Smith
Principal Software Engineer at Zocdoc
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Smith is a Principal Software Engineer in New York with 11 years of experience building distributed systems, developer platforms, and production ML pipelines. At Zocdoc he progressed from hands-on service development to leading platform initiatives that improve developer productivity, CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure reliability. He contributes actively to open-source projects—most notably OpenTelemetry—where his backend work improved trace ingestion and sampling across diverse formats, and to tooling like Pants and NUnit to harden builds and test automation. Comfortable across JVM/Python ecosystems, Spark/LightGBM ranking, and cloud migrations, he combines pragmatic engineering with a focus on observability and operational excellence. Colleagues rely on him to translate tricky, system-level problems into robust, maintainable solutions that scale.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at The College of New Jersey
Github Skills (47)
apache-spark10
docker10
test-driven-design10
teamcity10
data-science10
testing10
nunit10
machine-learning10
test-framework10
pyspark10
build-system10
dockers10
zipkin10
ml10
scala10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
nunit/nunit
Apr 2015 - Sep 2016
NUnit Framework
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:17 commits, 9 PRs, 8 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to improving the test automation framework of the NUnit project. Their work involved fixing issues related to XML escaping in test output, adding new test cases for specific scenarios, and enhancing the integration with TeamCity by modifying the output format. They also updated test configurations and refactored existing tests to use test IDs for more robust parallel execution. This demonstrates a focus on test quality, reporting, and maintainability within the framework.
nunitnunit-frameworktddtestingtest-framework
pantsbuild/pants
Jan 2024 - Mar 2026
The Pants Build System
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:41 reviews, 20 PRs, 113 comments in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to improving the Docker build process and remote caching capabilities of the Pants build system. They addressed issues related to Docker image builds with containerd-snapshotter, updated regex for Docker buildx output formats, and enhanced the S3 integration by allowing loading of AWS environment variables. Additionally, they made changes to improve the robustness of downloads and addressed an exponential backoff calculation issue.
build-systembuild-toolbuild-toolsmonorepopython
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