Chris Forrette

Core member of a small SRE team maintaining and evolving cloud infrastructure for Splice, a music platform serving millions of creators. Responsible for AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, and developer enablement. Joined as a Site Reliability Engineer and promoted to Senior in 2022.

• Authored the SRE team's North Star strategy document and multiple cross-functional RFCs; mentored engineers within and across teams, including supporting one teammate's promotion to Senior SRE.
• Owned CI/CD platform evolution over multiple years: migrated from Jenkins to self-hosted GitHub Actions on EKS, reducing build times by 75% and deploy times by 50%; later replaced the self-managed EKS cluster with a managed service (Depot), cutting maintenance burden for a small team and saving an estimated $30–60K per year.
• Migrated all API services from EC2 to ECS, consolidating compute and reducing operational overhead; built reusable CI/CD pipelines that standardized test, build, and deploy flows across all services.
• Owned Datadog observability end-to-end: optimized usage, authored best practices, and renegotiated contracts—reducing annual spend by $50K+ over multiple cycles.
• Managed cloud networking across multiple AWS regions (VPCs, public/private subnets, peering connections) and Cloudflare (DNS, WAF); governed Terraform workflows via Atlantis with semantically versioned modules across production, pre-production, and internal environments.
• Built foundational ML/AI infrastructure (SageMaker endpoints, networking & permissions, deployment pipelines), enabling the ML team to bring multiple models to production.
• On-call throughout my entire tenure at Splice, stepping in on complex incidents across team and codebase boundaries and translating findings into durable platform improvements: alerting, runbooks, and infrastructure changes that prevent recurrence.

Stack: AWS (ECS, EKS, RDS/Aurora, SageMaker, CloudFront, S3), Cloudflare, Kubernetes, Terraform/OpenTofu, Atlantis, AWS CDK, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Tailscale, Docker, Go, Python, Bash, MySQL, PostgreSQL.
Methodologies: Kanban, service-oriented architecture, infrastructure as code, serverless

Reporting to the CEO, worked on an early-stage startup's SaaS product. Monitored infrastructure and stability, maintained SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, built and maintained third-party integrations, and planned and built features. As the sole remote employee for an otherwise co-located team, quickly came up to speed on unfamiliar components—including event-driven architecture, backend services, and protobufs—shipping features within the first few weeks.

Stack: AWS (ECS, EC2, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB), Terraform, Jenkins, Go, Python, React.
Methodologies: Agile, microservices, event-driven architecture, REST.

Reporting to the Lead Architect, worked with a team of developers on an internal startup within Valiant Labs (Nike's internal startup incubator) testing out new business ideas in the market. Built an e-commerce site partnering with social media influencers to design limited-edition shoes, with a platform that also included a private user system for design creation and submittal and an internal admin UI built on microservices architecture.

• Led build of the API backend to meet unpredictably large scaling demand of one-week releases, enabling the component to withstand nearly one million requests in a single campaign and supporting a revenue increase of $260K.

Stack: AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ECS, CloudFormation), Node.js, Elasticsearch, React, GraphQL.
Methodologies: Agile, microservices, serverless.

Partnered with the CEO to build infrastructure and backend supporting both mobile and web applications. Wearing many hats as a startup leader: hired and managed the engineering team, designed and implemented tech strategy, wrote code, and built an events-focused product—unit tested, wired to CI for easy releasing, configured for monitoring—that catalogued 1M+ events in less than a year.

Stack: AWS (Lambda, SQS), Heroku, Terraform, CircleCI, Node.js, Elasticsearch, React, React Native.
Methodologies: Agile, REST, progressive web app.

Partnered with the founders and oversaw a team of freelance developers, building and delivering websites for clients including Epitaph Records, Remo, and Hopworks Brewing. In this extremely hands-on leadership role, wrote code as well as performed sales, business development, accounting, and project management activities.

Stack: AWS, Heroku, Python, Node.js, Elasticsearch, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (Backbone).
Methodologies: Waterfall, REST, single-page app.

A monthly Portland tech meetup with a thoughtful, intentional focus on diversity and inclusivity.

Coached a small group through an in-depth Django introduction workshop.