Kris Christopher — Forward Deployed Engineer, DevSecOps and Platform Engineering
I build the delivery systems other engineers ship through, and I embed with the teams that need them. Twelve-plus years of production engineering: secure CI/CD pipelines, internal developer platforms, cloud architecture on AWS, and the full-stack applications that run on top of all of it.
Most recently I led an eight-engineer tiger team modernizing CI/CD for safety-critical avionics software under DO-178C and DO-330, replacing commercial tooling with open-source equivalents for $3 million in delivered savings. Before that I consolidated 190 applications into a single readiness platform at Lockheed Martin. Since then I have designed and built a reusable, multi-language CI/CD component library covering Node.js, Java, Python, Go, Rust, C, C++ and Ada, with independently toggleable security gates and machine-readable compliance evidence.
The work I want next is forward deployed: embedded with a team or a customer, working the real backlog, shipping in their environment, and leaving the delivery system running when I go. I am glad to walk through the architecture of anything here in detail, including the parts that did not go to plan.
Delivery and platform engineering
- Secure CI/CD pipelines end to end: GitLab CI/CD, reusable pipeline templates and CI/CD Catalog components, quality gates, advisory and hard-gate enforcement modes, manual approval gates before deployment
- Internal developer platform and developer experience work: self-service pipelines, shared pipeline libraries, structured logging, metric emission, release and deployment automation
- Kubernetes delivery on k3s with Helm charts, daemonless container image builds with kaniko and buildah, and a self-hosted container registry
- Artifact management and promotion through Artifactory, with JFrog Xray artifact scanning and build-info traceability
- Observability and delivery metrics: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, DORA metrics, structured JSON reports for dashboards and audits
DevSecOps and software supply chain security
- Static application security testing (SAST) with Semgrep and Coverity; deep static analysis via build interception
- Software composition analysis (SCA), dependency and container image scanning with Trivy and Grype, at configurable severity thresholds
- Secret scanning with Gitleaks and Trivy secret detection, hard-gated so a committed credential fails the build
- SBOM generation with Syft, SLSA provenance and in-toto attestation, and artifact signing with Cosign
- License compliance scanning against policy; vulnerability policies enforced at commit time
- Zero-trust design aligned with NIST SP 800-207 principles, and policy evaluated from versioned code rather than prompt text
- Compliance evidence automation: control-matrix generation and HIPAA evidence packs produced by the pipeline itself
- Safety-critical quality gates with Coverity, Polyspace and VectorCAST under DO-178C and DO-330
Cloud and application engineering
- AWS: Amplify, Lambda, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, IoT Core, CloudFormation
- Full-stack: React, Next.js, Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, REST APIs, WebSockets
- Testing: Vitest, Jest, Playwright end-to-end, Stryker mutation testing, automated CI verification
- Data and search: DuckDB, Neo4j, Elasticsearch, Redis
- Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Bash, SQL
AI and agentic delivery
- Multi-agent orchestration across six AI coding-agent harnesses: session identity, work leases with fencing tokens, file claims, durable messaging, checkpoints and handoffs
- Model Context Protocol (MCP), LLM routing, hybrid retrieval, context engineering and agent evaluation
- Evidence-gated agentic development: AI governance with human-in-the-loop approval, so an agent never grades its own work
- Prompt-injection defenses that assign retrieved documents and tool results explicit authority classes
Where I have done it
- Collins Aerospace — Senior DevSecOps Consultant and Tiger Team Lead, March 2024 to April 2026
- Lockheed Martin — Full Stack Engineer, Aeronautics Division, March 2022 to February 2024
- KrisCodes2 LLC — Founder and Principal Engineer, 2021 to present
- Grow-Nanny — Founder, IoT product from prototype to production, 2018 to 2021
More
Contact: kris@kriscodes2.com · +1-787-631-6775 · Isabela, PR (remote, US hours)