Chris Smith

Building distributed systems,
AI tools and engineering teams

San Francisco Bay Area

About

I’m Chris Smith. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and build software, mostly around AI agents, infrastructure, distributed systems and data. I have an endless appetite for making things in both the digital and physical worlds.

With a background in engineering and psychology, and as a Zen practitioner, I’m drawn to the intersection of AI, cognitive psychology and contemplative practice. As we build minds in our own image, can we come to understand ourselves better in the process? What does it really mean for a model or a person to know something? What is the essential “self” behind our thoughts and feelings, and how should that shape where we take AI next? And if we created something with awareness, how would we even know? I think answering these questions is essential to developing technology in ways that enhance the human experience.

Since 2023 I’ve been on a career break, working independently on my own projects.

Projects

  • Sidetone ↗

    A secure voice-driven Android client for Claude Code on my home PC, with a local voice stack. It’s the primary interface used for its own development.

  • Cloud Chamber ↗

    Writes genuinely unusual scifi and horror short stories. Ideates, plans, checks and writes configurably, extracts example seed themes and styles, and supports user-defined canons.

  • Voiceover ↗

    An AI agent that makes phone calls for me, schedules appointments, takes notes and supports informational guardrails. Handles a wide range of conversational styles and situations.

  • Aleph ↗

    My ever-evolving core personal AI configuration for Claude Code, adding memory, observability and essential development patterns.

I’m also the original developer of Arrow, a popular Python datetime library. My GitHub has an eclectic collection of projects in other areas, including 3D graphics, emulation, PC game tools, and interactive toys and apps to entertain my two cats.

Experience

  1. 2017 — 2023

    Meta

    As an engineering manager, my team kept Facebook’s main web codebase buildable and deployable. We built and ran the integration and CI/CD systems that let about 10,000 engineers land dozens of commits per minute to a 100-million-line monorepo, built a novel E2E testing platform, and scaled code generation tools and practices in Facebook’s specialized languages and runtimes.

  2. 2014 — 2017

    Uber

    As one of Uber’s first data engineers, I helped build its first in-house realtime data system and scaled it through the hypergrowth years as it expanded across the world. I moved into management, then shifted to developer experience, and co-founded and led Mindfulness@, an employee group that offered meditation spaces and sessions at offices around the world.

  3. 2012 — 2014

    Circa

    As a backend engineer joining a mobile news startup pre-launch, I built their news feed and notification systems, owned data pipelines, built internal dashboards and managed their infrastructure as devops.

  4. 2010 — 2012

    Gremlin Social

    As the lead software developer at a social media management startup, I did full-stack development, built a sentiment analysis system, and assisted with fundraising as a technical speaker when pitching to investors.

Before software, I worked as a video engineer and projectionist under IATSE for multiple production companies across the Midwest at conferences, concerts and trade shows.

I hold a B.A. in psychology (2003) and a B.S. and M.S. in computer science (2011) from Webster University in St. Louis, MO.

Writing

  • 2017

    Word Embeddings in the Pāli Canon

  • 2016

    Hotel Gracery Shinjuku

  • 2016

    Yushima Tenman-gū

  • 2016

    The Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower

  • 2016

    Book Review: Cumulus

Contact

GitHub
github.com/crsmithdev
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/crsmithdev
Email
crsmithdev@gmail.com