Chris Spencer

I’m an engineering leader who’s built and managed scalable systems across distributed payments and high-throughput data platforms, with a strong emphasis on execution, quality, and mentorship. I’ve spent my career progressing through engineering processes, distributed systems at scale, and leadership—so teams can ship reliable, production-grade software.

As Software Engineering Manager at PayScale (PayFactors), I manage the engineering process behind the flagship PayFactors suite, helping companies set, manage, and optimize compensation using real market data at a scale of more than 54 million employees for 10,000+ organizations. I lead global teams spanning up to 17 direct reports across Software and QA, and I’ve supported the delivery of major initiatives including Payfactors Starter, Payfactors SmartPrice, and Payfactors SmartReporting—while actively maintaining technical debt and legacy applications.

At SAP Concur, I managed distributed payment systems powering the backend of a complex travel platform supporting 66 million users globally. I grew and led teams up to 12 engineers, built hiring and onboarding pipelines, and managed a distributed infrastructure of 14 Kubernetes-based microservices deployed in AWS via CI/CD; I also migrated from on-prem Kubernetes to AWS and implemented an oncall protocol with alerting and monitoring. I established and enforced SLOs for throughput, latency, and uptime (99.9%) and ran two-week agile sprints using Jira, Slack, and GitHub.

Earlier, I developed full-stack capabilities in the HealthCare IT domain as a WMS Application Developer at UPS Supply Chain Solutions, building systems that handled real-time pharmaceutical transactions across major warehouses. I later served as a Senior Software Design Engineer at SAP Concur, scaling ETL pipelines into near real-time Spark streaming for millions of records per day, migrating legacy microservices to AWS using Redshift, ECS, AWS CloudFormation templates, and DynamoDB, and resolving critical legacy issues—including an application failure around daylight savings that impacted revenue. I also migrated applications to be FIPS compliant and contributed to hiring by interviewing and onboarding engineers.