Chris Eppstein
San Jose,CA
Summary
- Engineering leader with over 25 years of experience building products, developer tools, platforms, and scalable front-end systems. I’m a highly technical manager who understands complex systems and guides projects to successful outcomes. I believe high-performing teams thrive when given the psychological safety and support to take bold, high-impact risks. I bias towards bottoms-up planning, strong collaboration, and a culture of high-craft impact.
- With 15+ years focused on developer experience and tooling, I excel in environments where engineers are the primary customers. I'm adept at shaping long-term roadmaps while solving short-term challenges, often without dedicated product management.
- Co-creator of Sass and contributor to multiple open source CSS tooling projects over more than a decade. The popularity of these tools, and the innovations from them, have now led to many durable changes to the CSS specification itself.
Overview
26
26
years of professional experience
Work History
Engineering Manager - Platform
Patreon
San Francisco, CA
02.2022 - Current
- Stood up the Frontend Platform and Mobile Platform teams.
- Led modernization of the web frontend stack, replacing custom implementations with open source standards for internationalization, server-side rendering, and state management.
- Oversaw the transition from JavaScript to TypeScript, increasing adoption from 15% in 2022 to 88% today.
- Spearheaded the overhaul of Patreon’s design system, enabling rapid design iteration, introducing dark mode, and cleaning up component usage across the product.
- Drove the implementation of our company's rebrand initiative on the web product, launched in October 2023.
- Established and operationalized a standardized bug reporting, triage, and management process across engineering, significantly improving product quality.
- Managed relationships with eight key vendors and two external development agencies.
- Created and organized the annual Foundations Offsite for 50+ attendees over two consecutive years.
- Oversaw numerous performance and reliability initiatives, establishing new best practices and technological foundations.
Senior Staff Engineer
LinkedIn
Sunnyvale, CA
05.2013 - 07.2021
- Led architecture and built tooling for stylesheet development supporting all LinkedIn frontend applications as the frontend engineering organization grew from ~300 engineers to ~2500 engineers.
- Led the creation of CSS Blocks and OptiCSS to improve style performance and maintainability.
- Created Eyeglass, a plugin system for Sass modules in node/npm, promoting modular and maintainable architecture.
Director of Software Architecture
Caring.com
San Mateo, CA
05.2007 - 05.2013
- First employee at Caring.com, responsible for building the company’s Ruby on Rails-based web platform.
- Led the engineering team’s growth, architecture planning, and technical roadmap to acquisition and profitability.
User Interface Architect
Teneros
Mountain View, CA
02.2005 - 04.2007
- Designed and built the admin interface for enterprise business continuity solutions.
Lead Software Engineer
ITM Software
Mountain View, CA
12.2003 - 02.2005
- Frontend development for IT management SAAS company.
Software Engineer – UI
Terraspring
Mountain View, CA
07.2000 - 12.2003
- Developed web UI frontend for one of the first server virtualization platforms.
Education
Bachelor of Science - Engineering and Applied Science
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Pasadena, CA01.2000
College of the Sequoias (Community College)
Visalia, CA01.1997
Skills
- Frontend development
- Design systems
- Vendor management
- Performance optimization
- Language and framework migrations
- Career coaching and development
- Developer libraries and tooling
Open Source
- Sass Stylesheet Language – Co-creator http://sass-lang.com/
- Eyeglass – A Sass module system https://github.com/linkedin/eyeglass
- CSS Blocks – Component-oriented CSS https://github.com/linkedin/css-blocks
- OptiCSS – A CSS optimizer https://github.com/linkedin/opticss
References
References available upon request.
Timeline
Engineering Manager - Platform
Patreon
02.2022 - Current
Senior Staff Engineer
LinkedIn
05.2013 - 07.2021
Director of Software Architecture
Caring.com
05.2007 - 05.2013
User Interface Architect
Teneros
02.2005 - 04.2007
Lead Software Engineer
ITM Software
12.2003 - 02.2005
Software Engineer – UI
Terraspring
07.2000 - 12.2003
Bachelor of Science - Engineering and Applied Science
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
College of the Sequoias (Community College)