Christina Branson
Staff Software Engineer | Platform Engineering & DevEx
Philadelphia, PA
Professional Summary
Staff-level engineer with a track record of modernizing critical systems, building durable developer infrastructure, and creating technical leverage across engineering organizations. I specialize in the work that compounds: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD modernization, zero-downtime runtime upgrades, and replacing tribal knowledge with systems and documentation that scale.
I've worked across healthcare, AdTech, and platform engineering — environments where changes need to be deliberate, reversible, and production-safe. My focus is on leaving platforms calmer, teams more effective, and systems easier to evolve than I found them.
I'm particularly drawn to the intersection of developer experience, data systems and infrastructure, and practical AI integration — the three areas where I think engineering judgment matters most right now.
Personal Summary
By day I modernize legacy systems and make engineers' lives slightly less chaotic. By night I write murder mysteries — fiction only, as my Substack bio clarifies.
In between, I'm:
- 🧒 Mom to a toddler who has approximately the same energy as a production incident
- 🏃♀️ A runner and rower, mostly to justify the next bullet point
- 🍵 Fueled by a dangerous amount of green tea (it's fine, it's fine)
- 📚 A reader with a soft spot for a good mystery (occupational hazard)
I also write in two places on Substack, depending on your interests:
- Tech Lead Field Notes — DevEx, AI-augmented engineering, and the boring (good) parts of building software
- How To Plan A Murder — serial fiction, personal musings, and other things that have nothing to do with my day job
Core Competencies
- Platform & Infrastructure Modernization (AWS CDK, CI/CD, Cloud Architecture)
- Developer Experience (Docs, Runbooks, Workflows, Cognitive Load Reduction)
- Data Systems & Infrastructure (Pipelines, Event-driven systems, Large-scale processing)
- AI-Augmented Engineering Workflows
- Legacy System Modernization (Zero-downtime upgrades, risk-managed change)
- Technical Leadership & Mentorship
Skills
- Languages:
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- Python
- TypeScript/JavaScript
- PHP
- Frameworks:
-
- Django
- React
- Next.js
- Ember
- Symfony
- Laravel
- Datastores:
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- Postgres
- DynamoDB
- MySQL
- AWS:
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- CDK
- Lambda
- ECS
- EC2
- Step Functions
- EMR
- DevOps:
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- GitHub Actions
- Docker
- Projen
- Data:
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- PySpark
- Databricks
Work Experience
May 2025 – Present
Senior Software Engineer at Vistar Media / T-Mobile (Acquisition)
- Drove early-stage infrastructure modernization, migrating from legacy AWS Copilot and CodePipeline to AWS CDK with GitHub Actions — establishing deployment patterns that improved portability, reduced operational risk, and laid the foundation for ephemeral feature environments and multi-region expansion.
- Modernized a production Symfony/PHP application from severely end-of-life versions to a current, supported stack with zero downtime, eliminating long-term security risk and enabling continued feature delivery without compounding technical debt.
- Delivered significant performance improvements to large-scale inventory ingestion workflows, removing a critical scalability bottleneck affecting partner onboarding and internal account operations.
- Improved team effectiveness by introducing operational runbooks, observability tooling, and standardized CI/CD workflows — reducing onboarding friction, deployment ambiguity, and incident resolution time.
Oct 2020 – May 2025
Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead at HealthVerity
- Served as Staff Engineer and Tech Lead on multiple high-impact initiatives across platform, data, and application layers in a highly regulated healthcare environment.
- Led the design and evolution of large-scale Django/React platforms enabling pharmaceutical companies to identify and recruit patients for clinical trials using billions of lab and genetic records.
- Architected and delivered search and exploration platforms for unstructured healthcare data, significantly improving pre-sales workflows and enabling faster, more accurate client insights.
- Drove architectural modernization by rebuilding legacy systems using AWS CDK for Infrastructure as Code, decomposing monoliths into modular, cloud-native services with clear ownership and service boundaries.
- Improved security posture, compliance readiness, and maintainability while reducing operational costs through thoughtful platform redesign.
- Led modernization of ML-backed PII redaction systems, improving scalability and reliability via batch processing, multithreading, and comprehensive automated testing with synthetic medical data.
- Acted as a force multiplier for the organization by mentoring engineers, shaping engineering best practices, and partnering with product and leadership to align technical direction with business goals.
Aug 2016 – Oct 2020
Backend Web Developer / Team Lead at AYC Media
- Led development and long-term evolution of a proprietary Laravel-based CMS serving clients across e-commerce, hospitality, entertainment, and non-profit sectors.
- Introduced foundational platform capabilities including multilingual support, ADA accessibility compliance, fine-grained permissions, and content preview workflows.
- Designed and implemented subscription billing and recurring payment systems, enabling new revenue models and expanding the company's client base.
- Delivered and maintained 50+ production websites, balancing client needs with platform stability and reuse.
- Achieved an 80% performance improvement on a large-scale e-commerce platform through strategic caching and backend optimization.
Mar 2013 – Jan 2016
Software Engineer at Archarithms, Inc
- Contributed to complex commercial and government systems, including social commerce platforms and analytics tools for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
- Supported mission-critical systems requiring high reliability, security awareness, and cross-team collaboration.
Education
Graduate Degree
MS Atmospheric Science
University of Alabama–Huntsville
Undergraduate Degree
BS Mathematics (Physics Minor)
Rowan University