Open to opportunities

Christopher Lopez

@christopherlopez2

Message

Senior software engineer leading production GenAI and LLMOps for customer-facing platforms.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to lead production GenAI and agentic systems with strong LLMOps: evaluation-driven development, guardrails, staged rollout/rollback, and cost/quality observability—while partnering with product and engineering to deliver auditable, deterministic workflows.

I’m a Lead AI Engineer with 12 years of software engineering experience, including architecting production GenAI and agentic systems for a customer-facing digital platform. I’ve built retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, LLM orchestration layers with LangChain, and cost and quality observability tooling—while keeping financial and compliance workflows deterministic, auditable, and separated from probabilistic agent behavior.

At Databricks, I led build-versus-buy decisions for an LLM orchestration layer, drove reliability improvements through evaluation-driven development, and implemented staged rollout, rollback, and production guardrails so every GenAI feature is gated by automated evaluation coverage. Previously, at Elastic and Algolia, I delivered high-throughput Python microservices and RESTful APIs, improved search and operational reliability, and introduced contract testing and CI/CD automation to prevent production issues.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Databricks

Apr 2021 - Present (5 years 4 months)

Led build-versus-buy evaluation for an LLM orchestration layer and implemented an approach to reduce annual tooling costs by ~15%. Built LLMOps pipelines with automated evaluation, versioned prompts, and staged rollout/rollback, and improved retrieval quality and AI cost/quality observability.

Large Language Models Orchestration RAG Vector Databases Prompt Versioning Agentic Systems LLM Evaluation Automated Rollback GuardRails Cost and Quality Observability Python

Software Engineer to Senior SE

Elastic

Sep 2017 - Mar 2021 (3 years 6 months)

Built and maintained Python microservices for policy quoting and risk-scoring APIs handling ~50,000 requests per day. Redesigned pipelines with asynchronous messaging, deployed a gradient-boosted fraud model, and delivered Elasticsearch-based full-text search, contract testing, and reliability improvements.

Python Microservices Architecture Asynchronous Message Queues Distributed Systems Machine Learning Gradient Boosting Elasticsearch Full Text Search Semantic Search Contract Testing Reliability Engineering Code Review

Software Developer

Algolia

Jun 2014 - Aug 2017 (3 years 2 months)

Developed RESTful APIs in Python and Django for internal reporting and optimized database performance for month-end reporting. Automated data reconciliation and releases with tests and CI/CD, and performed root-cause analysis for a database connection leak incident.