Hi I'm Chris!

I am a Chief Engineer, Architect, and lifelong IT nerd based in Melbourne, Australia. Tech has been my passion since my early teens, and I've been lucky enough to turn that passion into a career.

I specialise in building and scaling complex distributed systems within banking and financial services — operating at the intersection of architecture, engineering leadership, and strategy. With over 15 years of experience, my focus is on simplifying complexity: designing systems that are scalable, maintainable, and aligned to real business outcomes.

I love sharing my knowledge and experiences, whether through mentoring, writing, or speaking at conferences. You'll find me active in the tech community, always keen to learn and share ideas.

Chief Engineer at Commonwealth Bank (CBA)

I joined Commbank as a Chief Engineer in June 2025, and it's been a great year. My current focus is building conversational experiences powered by generative AI — working at the frontier of what AI can do for banking customers and engineering teams alike.

The scale and complexity of engineering at CBA is genuinely exciting. The culture is strong, the problems are hard, and the opportunity to shape how AI is transforming financial services makes this a great place to be doing this work.

Domain Architect at ANZ

ANZ was a huge part of my career journey, where I spent over 5 years as an Architect and Engineering Leader across Home Loans and Credit Risk. Over that time I grew from Tech Area Architect and Chapter Lead within ANZx into the Domain Architect, Home Loans role — leading a team of 13 architects and owning the architecture vision across the domain.

I played a key role in shaping the technology landscape across:

1. Temporal Durable Execution Platform; I led adoption for a number of use cases in Origination (including Home Loans), founded the ANZ Temporal Guild, and led the platform working group building reusable patterns and accelerators for Temporal users across the bank.

2. ANZx's API Platform; a key enabler for API standardisation across ANZx, including the Developer Portal, tooling around Buf, security policy automation, standards and governance.

3. Home Loans and Credit Risk; where I led the architecture and engineering of the first 10-minute Digital Home Loan proposition in Australia (through to Settlement), including:

   • Event-Driven Architecture using Google Pubsub and Protobuf
   • Microservices built with Go and Temporal
   • Cloud-Native practices on GCP
   • Building a strong engineering culture focused on collaboration, quality, and continuous improvement

4. Promoting modern architectural practices like Event Storming and Domain-Driven Design across the wider engineering community.

My time at Computershare...

Before ANZ, I spent nearly a decade at Computershare across a range of roles, growing from developer to architect. Highlights include:

• Designed and built a real-time document composition engine delivering sub-200ms performance
• Introduced React and JAMStack for micro-frontends, and led adoption of modern engineering practices
• Led Developer Experience and SRE strategy, improving engineering productivity and reliability
• Helped drive a major cloud migration to Azure, embracing IaC, GitOps, and distributed architectures
• Tech Lead for Computershare's Identity and Access Management (IDAM) platform through a major renovation
• Founded an internal developer community forum for monthly tech meetups

Earlier in my career, I led development teams across communication solutions and outbound communications platforms, and cut my teeth as a lead developer on key accounts including Suncorp, Carsales, and ANZ.

What I Bring

I'm a polyglot engineer, with experience across:

• Languages: Go, .NET Core, TypeScript, C++, Java, SQL, Perl, Common Lisp, and more
• Architectural Areas: Distributed Systems, Event-Driven Architectures, Integration, Experience Engineering, Cloud Architecture, Workflow Design, Security
• Leadership: Technical mentoring, community building, developer experience, engineering team leadership, and strategic architecture
• Cloud Platforms: GCP, Azure... learning AWS!

Beyond the tech, I believe in building strong engineering cultures, empowering teams, and keeping things practical — because the best architecture is one that actually gets delivered and makes life easier.

Outside of Work

When I'm not building systems or wrangling tech, you'll probably find me:

• Tinkering with my home lab or over-engineering my smart home
• Chasing new technologies and side projects
• Sharing ideas, learnings, and the occasional opinion here on the blog