Christopher Sivels
Chicago,IL
Summary
Senior Full-Stack Engineer specializing in high-scale web applications, with deep expertise in React/Next.js, Node.js, and AWS cloud architecture. I architect and optimize performant systems-from Next.js micro-frontends with SSR/ISR to distributed Node.js backends handling 50,000+ RPM-with a focus on reducing latency, cost, and operational overhead. My experience spans event-driven architectures (Kafka/EventBridge), PostgreSQL tuning, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to automate deployments and eliminate downtime. At Ahold Delhaize, I modernized legacy e-commerce platforms, while at Charlie Health, I built HIPAA-compliant telehealth systems with WebRTC and Redis-backed real-time features. I thrive in environments where scalability, observability, and clean abstractions drive business outcomes.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Software Engineer
Ahold Delhaize USA
07.2020 - Current
- Architected and led the migration of a legacy monolithic e-commerce platform to a Next.js micro-frontend architecture with React Server Components (RSC), reducing client-side JavaScript by 60% and improving SEO rankings by 25% through server-side rendering optimizations.
- Designed a high-throughput Node.js service handling 50,000+ RPM for real-time inventory updates, leveraging PostgreSQL with read replicas and connection pooling to reduce query latency from 1.2s to 150ms during Black Friday traffic spikes.
- Built an event-driven order fulfillment system using AWS EventBridge, Lambda, and SQS, processing 12,000+ asynchronous events per minute with dead-letter queue retries, cutting failed transactions by 90% and reducing manual reconciliation efforts.
- Optimized PostgreSQL performance by introducing partitioning for time-series data, rewriting complex CTE queries, and implementing pgBouncer for connection pooling, reducing report generation time from 45s to 2s for supply chain analytics dashboards.
- Deployed a CI/CD pipeline with AWS CodePipeline and Terraform, automating infrastructure provisioning for EC2 auto-scaling groups, RDS failover clusters, and CloudFront distributions, reducing deployment rollbacks by 75% and eliminating manual AWS console interventions.
- Developed a real-time streaming data pipeline using Kinesis Data Streams and Lambda, ingesting 2TB/day of customer clickstream data into Redshift, enabling near-real-time personalization A/B testing with 15% higher conversion rates.
- Led the adoption of OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing across Next.js, Node.js, and PostgreSQL, reducing incident MTTR by 40% through granular performance insights into slow API calls and database deadlocks.
Full Stack Developer
Teladoc Health
11.2016 - 06.2020
- Built a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform using React, Redux, and WebRTC, reducing patient onboarding time from 30 minutes to 8 minutes through dynamic form optimizations and secure WebSocket-based video session handshakes.
- Scaled a Node.js/Express backend to support 10,000+ concurrent users by implementing Redis caching for session management and connection pooling with PostgreSQL, reducing API latency from 800ms to 120ms during peak appointment scheduling.
- Designed a real-time chat system for therapist-patient communication using Socket.io and AWS ElastiCache (Redis), ensuring message delivery with 99.99% SLA and end-to-end encryption via AES-256, cutting support tickets for lost messages by 95%.
- Automated AWS ECS Fargate deployments with Terraform and GitHub Actions, reducing production release cycles from 2 hours to 12 minutes and enabling blue-green deployments with zero downtime for critical patient-facing applications.
- Optimized PostgreSQL full-text search for clinical note retrieval by implementing GIN indexes and tsvector columns, reducing search latency from 5s to 200ms for therapists querying historical patient records.
- Integrated Twilio for SMS appointment reminders with Node.js event workers, reducing no-show rates by 22% and saving $150K annually in missed revenue by triggering automated rescheduling workflows.
- Pioneered infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for the engineering team by migrating manual AWS setups to Terraform modules, standardizing VPCs, security groups, and RDS configurations across 3 environments, eliminating configuration drift issues.
Education
Bachelor's degree - Computer Science
University of Illinois Chicago
05-2016
Skills
- React
- Nextjs
- TypeScript
- Redux
- WebRTC
- Tailwind CSS
- Jest
- Cypress
- Nodejs
- Express
- NestJS
- GraphQL
- RESTful APIs
- WebSockets (Socketio)
- PostgreSQL (partitioning, indexing, pgBouncer)
- Redis
- Elasticsearch
- AWS (Lambda, RDS, EC2, SQS, EventBridge, CloudFront)
- Terraform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitHub Actions
- CI/CD
- Kafka
- Kinesis
- Spark
- ETL Pipelines
Timeline
Senior Software Engineer
Ahold Delhaize USA
07.2020 - Current
Full Stack Developer
Teladoc Health
11.2016 - 06.2020
Bachelor's degree - Computer Science
University of Illinois Chicago
Personal Information
Title: Senior Software Engineer