Chris Polanco

I’m a Backend Engineer with 10+ years designing and scaling financial infrastructure—serverless cloud systems and multi-tenant APIs built for high-throughput transaction platforms. I’m especially focused on AWS Lambda-based architectures, secure API access, and money movement systems that integrate across credit unions, fintech products, and open banking.

At TekChoice LLC, I architected the TekCore API: a production multi-tenant fintech ecosystem with 25+ AWS Lambda-based microservices and a custom SymXchange middleware layer. I used AWS SAM, Lambda, API Gateway, and Cognito (OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow) to enable scalable M2M API access across tenants, and I reduced Lambda cold start times from 6s to 2.5s (58% improvement).

I also built the SymXCore SDK—a standardized C# client for Symitar’s SymXchange banking API—focused on per-tenant configuration and unified financial data access. To expand open banking capabilities, I implemented Plaid integration via AWS CloudFront/Lambda, delivering real-time account and transaction retrieval for downstream financial workflows.

I bring a hands-on, entrepreneurial mindset and value engineering enablement: I automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline, and I mentored engineers across the US & Mexico on AWS best practices, serverless patterns, GitHub workflows, and SDK integration. Earlier in my career at Jack Henry & Associates and Valor Credit Union, I supported core banking operations, built automation that reduced manual processing overhead by 80%, and owned full-lifecycle banking systems including wire transfers and regulatory compliance.