Open to opportunities

Chris McIntosh

@chrismcintosh

Senior software engineer and technical leader building secure, scalable SaaS platforms with measurable reliability gains.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a senior technical-lead role building secure, scalable SaaS systems. I want to partner cross-functionally, ship microservices and resilient event-driven architectures, invest in observability/SLOs, and apply AI/ML to reduce operational load.

I’m a senior software engineer and technical leader with 10+ years building SaaS platforms across backend, frontend, and cloud environments. I specialize in scalable architecture and secure, reliable delivery—turning ambiguous requirements into shipped products.

At Cardinal Health, I led delivery of Java/Kotlin microservices on AWS, improving API reliability to 99.95% and reducing incident volume by ~30%. I designed domain-oriented service architecture with PostgreSQL and Kafka events, and tightened delivery through contract-first APIs and clearer boundaries.

I’m equally focused on operating systems for software. I implemented end-to-end observability with OpenTelemetry and Datadog (traces, metrics, logs) with SLO dashboards, cutting mean time to detect by ~40% and speeding root-cause analysis during production regressions.

I also bring applied AI/ML to practical workflows—building Python risk/anomaly signal pipelines and introducing LLM-assisted internal tooling for runbook summarization and incident note drafting while maintaining auditability. From OAuth 2.0/OIDC and JWT to fine-grained RBAC and threat modeling, I partner with security to strengthen trust and safety.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Lead Software Engineer

Cardinal Health

Apr 2025 - Feb 2026 (10 months)

Led delivery of Java/Kotlin microservices on AWS (ECS, RDS), improving API reliability to 99.95% and reducing incident volume by ~30%. Designed a domain-oriented service architecture with PostgreSQL and Kafka, implemented OpenTelemetry/Datadog observability with SLO dashboards, and built a Python risk/anomaly pipeline that reduced manual triage workload by ~20%.

Java Kotlin Microservices AWS ECS PostgreSQL Kafka OpenTelemetry Datadog Python

Principal Engineer

Ware2Go

Apr 2021 - Mar 2025 (3 years 11 months)

Owned architecture and execution for a multi-tenant SaaS platform, scaling Node.js/TypeScript services on AWS to support rapid growth while maintaining 99.9%+ uptime. Improved API performance (p95 latency ~35%) using PostgreSQL/Redis, introduced Kafka-based event-driven workflows for resiliency, and modernized the frontend with React/TypeScript, reducing UI defect rates by ~25%.

Node TypeScript AWS PostgreSQL Redis Kafka React Terraform Kubernetes Python

Senior Software Engineer

BetterCloud

Sep 2013 - Apr 2021 (7 years 7 months)

Developed and maintained Java backend services for a security-focused SaaS product, delivering reliable integrations and automation with strong auditability and access controls. Built React/TypeScript features that improved admin workflows and reduced support tickets, and enhanced large-tenant search performance using Elasticsearch alongside automated testing with JUnit/Mockito and CI pipelines.