Three decades of shipping, from bare metal up.
I'm Christopher Olsen — an engineering leader and software architect who has spent nearly thirty years building software at every layer of the stack, from kernels and bootloaders to cloud-native platforms serving real users.
I started writing an operating system from scratch in 2002, founded two companies, raised angel and equity financing, and shipped products people actually depended on. Today I architect enterprise-scale platform modernization across a high-traffic, multi-property live-streaming network — the unglamorous, high-stakes work of taking systems that grew by accretion and giving them a spine. Increasingly that work is AI-native: I built an AI code-review gate directly into our CI pipeline, where a model reviews every change before it can merge — using AI to raise engineering velocity and quality at the same time.
What ties it all together is a bias toward simple, durable systems — code small enough to read in a sitting and boring enough to trust in production. The founder's instinct to ship, tempered by the architect's instinct to make it last.
Chief Architect at VS Media (Westlake Village, CA) — I set the technical direction and architectural coherence for the company's ~30-person engineering organization across five departments (backend/PHP, JavaScript & frontend, DevOps/Systems, and chat & video streaming), through influence rather than direct authority, and I'm the principal author of the platform's codebase. Right now I'm leading a live migration of the chat & video streaming platform (~30K concurrent) off a decade-old C++ core, alongside a multi-quarter modernization consolidating 24 customer-facing surfaces onto a unified modern stack. I also built the platform's AI-native quality gate — an automated machine-review pass across every language, followed by an AI code-review stage that blocks merges until its findings are resolved. Formalized as Chief Architect in 2026, after operating in the role since late 2025.
→ Full detail in the résumé
- 2021 – PresentEngineering Manager → Solutions Architect → Chief Architect · VS Media
- 2020 – 2021Head of Information Technology · Empower Group Partners
- 2014 – 2019CTO & Co-Founder · SpherePBX
- 2010 – 2014CEO & Lead Architect · uBix Technologies
- 2000 – PresentFounder & Owner · Domain Atlantic
- 1998 – 2001Network Administrator · Web Express · Software Engineer · Plug'nPay
"This was a tragedy and I personally don't feel that anybody should capitalize off of it."
Following the September 11 attacks, Christopher built the World Trade Center Memorial site the next day — uploading photos of the missing, victim lists, and a card of hope that collected hundreds of signatures within two hours. The site accepted no advertising.
Languages
AI-Native Engineering
Frontend
Backend & Architecture
Infrastructure & DevOps
Specialties