Chris Baldwin

Minneapolis, MN • 612-968-7474 • [email protected] • linkedin.com/in/chrisdbaldwin • voidtalker.com

Professional Summary

Senior Reliability Engineer with a wide technical background and a strong sense of how systems, data, and developer workflows fit together. I build observability and platform foundations that improve clarity, performance, and the overall effectiveness of engineering teams. I'm good at spotting patterns across reliability, infrastructure, and product, and I use that perspective to guide teams toward strong technical and strategic decisions. I'm moving toward roles that blend technical leadership with long-term architectural and organizational strategy.

Experience

Senior Reliability Engineer

SPS Commerce — Oct 2024-Present
Minneapolis, MN / Remote
  • Lead SRE for observability, distributed tracing, and platform reliability across EKS, ECS, and AWS Lambda.
  • Architected and deployed OpenTelemetry ingestion pipelines, improving signal quality and cross-team visibility.
  • Served as steward for the company's Observability Guild, facilitating biweekly cross-team sessions and ongoing Slack discussions that strengthened shared practices.
  • Contributed to early SLO adoption efforts and supported teams in defining meaningful service health indicators.

Reliability Engineer

SPS Commerce — Apr 2022-Oct 2024
  • Implemented structured logging, distributed tracing, and standardized monitoring.
  • Built automation for Kubernetes deployments and on-call support workflows.
  • Modernized CI/CD pipelines and internal tooling in collaboration with platform teams.
  • Supported incident response, postmortems, and reliability-focused architecture changes.

Development Operations Engineer

Spok — May 2019-Apr 2022
  • Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code for Spok’s critical communications platform.
  • Automated systems using Packer, Ansible, Chef, CloudFormation, Lambda, Python, and Troposphere.
  • Administered GitHub, AWS, Datadog, Jenkins, and internal tools to improve developer velocity.
  • Delivered standardized tooling that reduced operational overhead across engineering teams.

Software Engineer II

Spok — May 2016-May 2019
  • Developed backend .NET/SQL services supporting hospital and emergency communication systems.
  • Reduced build/test cycle times by maintaining pipelines and internal infrastructure.
  • Improved delivery workflows via infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD enhancements.

Software Engineer

Starkey Hearing Technologies — Sep 2014-Dec 2015
  • Full-stack C#/JavaScript/Knockout.js development for customer-facing business applications.
  • Reduced support workload by improving online tools (StarkeyPro, eStore).

Research Associate - Mathematics Department

University of St. Thomas — May 2013-May 2014
  • Built data processing pipelines analyzing knot structures in folded proteins.
  • Ran HPC workloads and contributed to published research datasets.

Education

B.A. Mathematics — University of St. Thomas (2011-2014)

Software Engineering — Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (2009-2011)

Additional Experience

Co-founder & Consultant — Baldwin MN LLC

2022-Present
  • Support teams with marketing analytics, observability, platform engineering, and AI-assisted development.
  • Develop prototypes leveraging OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, AWS Lambda, Zig, Wasm, and event-driven architectures.

Interests

Community building • Blogging • Game design • Home lab engineering • AI tooling • Open Source