Hi I'm Chris!

I am an 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've been designing and building software systems for over 15 years, with deep experience across Communications, Fintech, and Financial Services. My passion is tackling complex distributed systems and making them simple, scalable, and maintainable — blending hands-on engineering with architectural strategy.

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.

Being a Chief Engineer at Commbank (CBA)

Currently, I am a Chief Engineer at Commbank (CBA). I'm still figuring out what that means, but for now it involves a good mix of hands-on engineering, build and practice along with strategic architecture and leadership. I haven't been at Commbank long but so far the culture is great, the people are awesome and the tech is interesting.

Generative AI is a big focus for me at the moment, and I'm excited to explore how it can transform our engineering practices and customer experiences. I believe in the power of AI to enhance productivity, creativity, and problem-solving in software development.

Domain Architect, Home Loans and Credit Risk at ANZ (ANZx / ANZ Plus)

ANZ was a huge part of my career journey, where I spent over 6 years as a Domain Architect and Engineering Leader across Home Loans and Credit Risk.

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

1. Temporal Durable Execution Platform; a powerful code-first workflow platform. I led the adoption for a number of use cases in Origination (including Home Loans) as well as founding the ANZ Temporal Guild and building a community around Temporal at ANZ. I also led the platform working group building reusable patterns and accelerators for Temporal users at ANZ.

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

3. Home Loans and Credit Risk; where I led the architecture and engineering of the build out of a largely greenfield platform for the first 10-minute Digital Home Loan propisition 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; when I joined these were relatively new concepts, and along with a few colleagues I helped introduce them to the wider community.

My time at Computershare...

Before ANZ, I worked in innovation and digital transformation at Computershare, where I:

• Introduced React and JAMStack for micro-frontends
• Led Developer Experience and SRE strategy
• Helped drive a major cloud migration to Azure, embracing IaC, GitOps, and distributed architectures
• Designed and delivered real-time document composition solutions (sub-200ms performance!)

Earlier in my career, I led development teams across communication solutions, identity management, and outbound communications platforms.

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, and strategic planning
• 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