Christopher Blackden
Systems Engineer Principal at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Greater Philadelphia United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Blackden is a systems engineering leader with 11 years of experience building and optimizing cloud-native research infrastructure, currently serving as Systems Engineer Principal at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He combines hands-on DevOps skills—Terraform, AWS, Docker, PostgreSQL, Jenkins/GitHub Actions—and a track record of delivering significant cost savings (over $120k/year) and compliance (NIST 800-171) for large genomic data programs. An educator and content author, he creates technical courses for Pluralsight and has taught graduate cloud computing, translating complex topics into practical training. Christopher pairs deep operational experience managing petabyte-scale research data with software-driven automation and internal tooling in Python, enabling reproducible, secure pipelines for NIH-funded projects. His background spans enterprise DevOps, systems administration, and developer enablement, and he often surfaces hidden efficiencies by instrumenting systems for better observability and cost control. Based in Greater Philadelphia, he blends academic rigor (MS in Systems Engineering) with a creative approach to technical education and tooling.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree, System Engineering, Master’s Degree, System Engineering at Drexel UniversityBachelor’s Degree, Integrated Science, Business and Technology, Bachelor’s Degree, Integrated Science, Business and Technology at La Salle UniversityFront-End Web Developer Nanodegree, Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree at UdacityComputer Engineering, Computer Engineering at George Mason University
English, Spanish, html, css, powershell, python, javascript, sql, groovy
Stackoverflow
11reputation
741reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (120)
python10
emoji10
terraform10
automation10
home-assistant10
terraform-module10
mqtt10
xiaomi10
pluralsight10
home-automation10
voting10
garden10
iot10
esphome10
internet-of-things10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
devbyaccident/aws-cdk-course-materials
Aug 2020 - Nov 2020
Contributions:11 commits, 1 push in 2 months
devbyaccident/Introduction-to-Terraform
Sep 2021 - Apr 2022
Contributions:32 commits, 6 PRs, 14 pushes in 7 months
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