Christopher Settles
Co-Founder & CEO at Refresh
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
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.
10 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 (39)
webscraping9
server9
python8
agent8
image-processing8
image7
chrome-extension7
connections7
automation7
computer-vision7
shell6
openai6
grpc6
zsh6
ai6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
ChristopherRSettles/sinxcosx-Integrator
May 2016 - Aug 2019
Contributions:5 pushes, 1 branch, 2 issues in 3 years 4 months
neverSettles/neverSettles.github.io
Jul 2020 - Jun 2023
Contributions:33 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 11 months
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