Chris Muller

About

Hands-on engineer, team multiplier.

I'm Chris, a principal engineer with eleven years of building SaaS products and the platforms under them. I set the technical direction for platforms that several teams build together, and I stay hands-on while I do it.

Selected results

  • 0minutes downtime

    Led engineering teams through an infrastructure migration across multiple SaaS products, keeping every SLA.

  • 3×traffic growth

    Moved a delivery platform to an event-driven architecture that absorbed three times the load.

  • 40%fewer deploy errors

    Rebuilt GitOps tooling and automated deployments, cutting deployment friction and error rates.

  • 60%faster deploys

    Introduced modern CI/CD on Kubernetes so engineers ship changes in a fraction of the time.

  • Dailypayouts, not weekly

    Redesigned a payment system across multiple providers, PCI compliant, and paid out daily instead of weekly.

  • 99.9%reliability

    Built real-time driver tracking and automated booking for thousands of daily transactions.

Strengths

Direction you can follow

I set architecture, standards and repo structure, then write them down: C4 diagrams, specs before code, and a record of every key decision. Teams move faster when the reasoning is on the page.

Product and platform, end to end

From customer-facing features in Go, Node and TypeScript down to Kubernetes, service mesh and Terraform. I've shipped both sides, so I design them to fit together.

Migrations without drama

I've moved live products between platforms and architectures with zero downtime and SLAs intact, by planning with the teams who'll feel it and rolling out in steps you can undo.

Strong, independent teams

I hire well, mentor closely and use design reviews and deep dives to spread knowledge, so engineers own their features from idea to production.

Trade-offs in plain language

I work with customers, designers, architects and leadership, and turn technical options into decisions people can make: what it costs, what it risks, what it buys.

Reliability by design

Observability first, SLOs agreed, autoscaling that follows demand, and a retro with actions after every major incident.

The path

  1. Now

    Tech lead and staff engineer, a leading radiology company

    Technical direction and delivery for a platform built by two teams: architecture, standards, hands-on engineering and production support.

  2. 2024–2025

    Cloud infrastructure engineer, global SaaS

    EKS, GitOps with Argo CD, Istio service mesh, KEDA and Karpenter autoscaling, cell-based architecture across regions, and internal tooling in Go.

  3. 2021–2024

    Senior backend and full-stack engineer, delivery platform

    Led design of customer-facing SaaS features: payments, real-time tracking, booking workflows and the move to event-driven microservices.

  4. 2019–2021

    Software development engineer, global IT services R&D

    Event-driven microservices and custom integrations for complex clients, a cloud-native migration to Azure, and infrastructure as code for RabbitMQ at 500,000+ permissions.

  5. 2015–2019

    Full-stack software engineer, software consultancy

    Full-stack SaaS for web and mobile across many customer projects: Node, React, GraphQL, TypeScript and Java.

How I work

  1. Simple version first. Get something working, find the real bottleneck, and improve only that.
  2. Write decisions down. A decision nobody can find gets made again, usually worse.
  3. Ask what happens when it fails. What if this node dies, the request retries, or the job runs twice?
  4. Make myself unnecessary. The best sign of leadership is a team that ships without waiting for me.
  5. Two options, then a choice. Name the alternatives, pick one, and say what it costs.

Tools I reach for

  • Go
  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Java
  • Python
  • React
  • Kubernetes
  • Istio
  • Argo CD and Rollouts
  • KEDA
  • Karpenter
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • CUE
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Buildkite
  • GitLab CI
  • RabbitMQ
  • SQS
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • C4 architecture
  • Decision records
  • AI-assisted coding and agents

Also

  • BSc in Mathematical Sciences, majoring in mathematics and economics, from the University of Johannesburg
  • Certified SAFe 4 Agilist
  • Won a global hackathon in 2020 with a computer vision and machine learning system for managing crowds

The name

Umlungu honours where I come from. I studied in Johannesburg and now build from Australia, and this is the space where I work out what comes next. Away from work you'll find me on the water or under the hood.