Chris Petro

I’m a principal engineer and technical leader with over 15 years of building backend systems in Java, at both startup and enterprise scale. Most recently, as Head of Engineering and later CTO at Lucky Orange, I led a 10-engineer team and a behavioral analytics platform processing hundreds of millions of events a day, writing production code throughout.

I specialize in data-heavy applications that give customers real-time, up-to-the-second insight. I remodeled heatmap data so reports that took minutes load in under a second, rewrote our ingestion service in Java to handle 20× the load, redesigned multi-tenant Elasticsearch partitioning to bring weekly incidents to near zero, and introduced SingleStore with a Redpanda pipeline built for 10× peak traffic.

I make systems faster and cheaper at the same time: 50% lower operating cost on the heatmap rebuild, 70+ pods cut to 5, and $400K+ a year saved on storage. I also built anomaly detection that shut down up to 20 fraudulent accounts a week, and a Shopify billing integration that grew revenue through Shopify 40%.

Before Lucky Orange, I spent four years at Broadridge, a large, publicly traded financial-services technology company, building high-performance SaaS platforms under strict regulatory and audit requirements. I improved our archival platform’s performance 5× while cutting $240K a year in AWS costs, built an event-driven pipeline processing 30K+ documents a day, and designed multi-region failover that switched regions in under 5 minutes and passed audit for a client SLA on bank-statement storage. I also took releases from 1–2 to dozens a month without loosening compliance controls.

As a leader, I set the engineering roadmap and introduced spec-driven, AI-assisted development that turns each ticket into human-reviewed checkpoints, cutting turnaround 50–75%.

I’m looking for a remote, hands-on principal role on backend and data platforms where performance and cost both matter.