Christopher Tiwald
Software Engineering Manager at Google
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Tiwald is a seasoned software engineering manager in New York with 14 years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, currently leading the priority queue team for Google’s distributed build system that handles tens of millions of builds and tests daily. He blends hands-on engineering (Kotlin, Java, C++, Go, Python) with people leadership, having managed teams ranging from individual contributors to 20+ SREs and stewarded multi-million dollar technical budgets. Earlier roles show deep DevOps and reliability expertise—designing auto-scaling architectures, driving Conductor’s move to containerized production, and delivering 99.99% uptime improvements. He is an active open-source contributor to Terraform, adding AWS resource support and improving test coverage, underscoring a commitment to reliable infrastructure-as-code. Unusually for a tech leader, he began his career in political campaigns and as a Ph.D. candidate in political science, bringing evidence-driven decision making and field-tested organizing instincts to engineering strategy. Colleagues value him for converting complex operational problems into automated, cost-saving systems and for coaching teams to ship resilient software at scale.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Political Science, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Political Science at University of Nebraska-LincolnUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (14)
infrastructure-as-code10
terraformer10
cloud-infrastructure10
go10
aws10
cloud-computing10
aac10
terraform10
networking9
vpn9
load-balancing9
test-automation8
testing8
cloud-manager7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
hashicorp/terraform
Apr 2015 - Dec 2015
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Role in this project:
Cloud Engineer / Infrastructure Engineer
Cloud Engineer / Infrastructure EngineerContributions:46 commits, 18 PRs, 70 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:Christopher contributed significantly to the AWS infrastructure management within the Terraform repository. Their work primarily focused on adding support for various AWS resources, including `aws_lb_cookie_stickiness_policy`, `aws_app_cookie_stickiness_policy`, `aws_customer_gateway`, and `aws_vpn_connection`. The contributions involved implementing resource definitions, writing acceptance tests, and adding documentation, indicating a focus on expanding the repository's capabilities for AWS resource provisioning and management. Furthermore, the user's work on fixing acceptance tests demonstrates their commitment to maintaining code quality.
versionedconfiguration-filescloud-managementawscloud
ctiwald/terraform
Apr 2015 - Mar 2016
Contributions:50 pushes, 19 branches in 11 months
devopsinfrastructureinfrastructure-as-codeawsterraform
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