Chris Pierce

Engineering leader who builds resilient teams through hypergrowth, acquisitions, and organizational change.

Experience

1Password

Engineering Manager, Platform Advancement

2021 – Present
  • Grew 3 individual contributors into Engineering Manager roles, supporting their transition into leadership.
  • Scaled the engineering org by 40% during hypergrowth, hiring peers and direct reports across multiple squads.
  • Redesigned team structure and processes during a company-wide reorg, improving delivery velocity by over 30%.
  • Oversee 6 platform client applications spanning macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and browser extensions.

15five

Director of Engineering

2020 – 2021
  • Stabilized and scaled teams through an organizational acquisition, coaching existing engineers and hiring new talent.
  • Mentored an IC into their first management role, resulting in a successful new team under their leadership.
  • Drove cross-functional alignment with Product, consistently delivering against company-wide OKRs across multiple squads.

Shogun

Senior Engineering Manager, Site Reliability

2020
  • Stood up a 4-person SRE team from scratch, establishing norms, onboarding workflows, and incident processes.
  • Introduced Datadog and observability tooling, improving infrastructure stability and performance visibility.
  • Built a structured incident severity classification and alerting system, reducing response time and improving operational clarity.
  • Conducted security assessments and hardened platform infrastructure based on security findings.

Formstack

Director of Engineering, TechOps

2015 – 2020
  • Hired and scaled a team of 20+ engineers across multiple disciplines and seniority levels.
  • Led technical due diligence and integration for 4 M&A events, aligning standards, people, and systems post-acquisition.
  • Drove adoption of PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance frameworks, embedding security into engineering workflows.
  • Owned vulnerability management program, triaging and remediating application security findings across the product portfolio.

Skills

Leadership

Team structuring, hiring, coaching, and performance management. Scaling orgs through hypergrowth. Psychological safety and engineering excellence driven by measurable outcomes.

DevOps & Cloud

Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization, serverless architectures, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and relational and NoSQL database design.

Security & Compliance

GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, HITrust, CCPA, and SOC 2. Zero Trust Architecture, IAM, RBAC, vulnerability management, and application security.

Languages & AI

PHP, Swift, TypeScript, Bash, Rust, Python, Ruby, Go, and Java. Local model deployment, RAG pipelines, MCP integration, and agentic AI workflows for engineering productivity.

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional AWS Certified Database – Specialty AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner