Christopher Settles
Co-Founder & CEO at Refresh
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Settles is a founder and machine learning engineer with 11 years of experience building production-grade systems and leading teams from research to deployed infra. As Co-Founder and CEO of Refresh (YC X25), he is developing RL environments to advance capabilities in frontier models, drawing on prior ML and infra work at Uber that scaled a real-time fraud feature store handling 1B+ Kafka events/day and prevented $100M+ in losses. His background spans federated learning research at UIUC—where he built privacy-preserving distributed training infrastructure that seeded NSF funding—to practical large-scale engineering at Google and Bank of America. Comfortable across the stack, he’s shipped Go static-analysis tools, Spark/Presto pipelines, and distributed PyTorch systems, and he has a habit of turning academic prototypes into production-ready services. Based in San Francisco, he left a growing leadership offer to start Refresh, signaling a strong founder bias for product-first impact. An under-the-radar strength is blending customer-facing operational rigor with deep ML tooling experience, enabling trustworthy model evaluation across diverse document sources.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
West Aurora High SchoolAssociate's degree Computer Science, Associate's degree Computer Science at Waubonsee Community CollegeNights and Weekends s3 & s4, Nights and Weekends s3 & s4 at buildspaceMasters of Computer Science & Bachelors of Science Computer Science College of Engineering, Masters of Computer Science & Bachelors of Science Computer Science College of Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignX25, X25 at Y Combinator
English, Spanish, c++, java, c, python, go
Stackoverflow
353reputation
33kreached
14answers
4questions
server
top-5%
Github Skills (40)
debugging10
server9
playwright9
webscraping8
image-processing7
browser-extension7
javascript7
ai7
automation7
python7
computer-vision6
shell6
grpc6
zsh6
agent6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
neverSettles/DRS4-Data-Analysis-Interface
Aug 2016 - Aug 2019
Contributions:1 PR, 8 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 1 month
data-analysispython
Llama2D/llama2d
Sep 2023 - May 2025
2D Positional Embeddings for Webpage Structural Understanding 🦙👀
Contributions:1 review, 4 PRs, 8 pushes in 1 year 7 months
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