CHRISTOPHER STIPES
Experience
- Scaled receipt ingestion pipeline to process 1.5-2M digital orders daily, delivering a high-performing and reliable data product
- Reduced incidents from multiple per month to near-zero by enforcing observability, automation, and CI/CD quality validation
- Partnered across backend, ML, mobile, and data teams to enforce cross-team QA/QE standards
- Defined and tracked quality metrics (release stability, defect escape rate, hotfix frequency) to ensure system reliability
- Dockerized Go-based integration tests, embedding them into CI/CD pipelines
- Built a real-world data library for receipts by leveraging customer event streams into Snowflake, enabling robust automated test data setup
- Presented monthly at company-wide tech all-hands with Grafana dashboards to highlight KPIs, improvements, and challenges impacting quality metrics
- Directed a QA organization of 40+ staff and 4 managers, implementing best practices and leading automation initiatives.
- Established automation testing frameworks (Appium, Playwright, Go/Python), integrating them into CI/CD pipelines for continuous validation.
- Built a scalable test environment strategy, driving cross-platform testing across iOS, Android, backend, and web applications.
- Oversaw the automation of regression and sanity test suites, enhancing reliable coverage and streamlining regression cycles.
- Led POCs for new automation frameworks, scaling successful pilots and delivering hands off test data setup systems.
- Established human-readable reporting of test results to Slack and Jira, ensuring visibility and faster issue resolution.
- Acted as a liaison with product, engineering, and business teams to ensure alignment and collaboration.
- Led a cross-functional team of 10 engineers (mobile, web, backend, data) to deliver scalable ad-tech platforms
- Re-architected systems for high availability and multivendor support
- Introduced contract/schema validation at build time, embedding quality into CI/CD pipelines
- Increased ad revenue ~15% through product reliability and placement optimizations
- Drove adoption of modern QA tools (Cypress, Detox, Postman replacements) and mentored engineers on quality-first practices
- Introduced Cypress and Detox for end-to-end testing across platforms
- Replaced Postman-based testing with embedded test frameworks for backend services
- Built Locust + Grafana load testing framework integrated with CI/CD reporting
- Designed automated data validation system for product ingestion and search relevance
- Improved testing efficiency by 25% by developing a new automation framework for mobile and web using Appium and Selenium.
- Created Excel-based automated test data tooling for recurring test scenarios.
- Integrated performance and load testing (Artillery) into microservice templates.
Education
Summary
QUALITY ENGINEERING LEADER Backend Engineering | QA & Automation Strategy | CI/CD | Scaling Teams & Systems | Observability Engineering leader with 12+ years of experience across backend, QA, and mobile engineering. Proven expertise in establishing QA/QE best practices, implementing robust test automation frameworks, integrating testing into CI/CD pipelines, and driving quality metrics across organizations. Skilled in stakeholder management, cross-functional collaboration, and scaling teams to deliver reliable, high-performing software solutions.
KEY IMPACTS
Increased daily receipt ingestion by 50%, processing 2 million orders with 1 million distinct users a day.
Boosted ad revenue by 15% through new ad partner integration and CMS layer to add placements without code changes.
Optimized data ingestion monitoring with real-time checks for fields to drastically improve downstream purchase data quality for partners.
Streamlined QA workflows, leading to 30% faster defect resolution times and improved team efficiency.
LANGUAGES AND FRAMEWORKS
- Go
- Python
- AWS
- Ruby
- Docker
- End-To-End Testing
- GitHub
- Grafana
- GraphQL
- Java
- Jenkins
- JIRA
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- Load Testing
- PostgreSQL
- Python
- Redis
- Ruby
- Scrum
- Selenium
- Slack
- Snowflake
- GitHub Actions
- Microservices
- gRPC
- Appium
- DynamoDB
- In-Memory Caches