Engineering Manager

Chip Carnes

Engineering leader building team cultures where people do their best work together, joyfully. Also, makes a lot of rye bread.

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Summary

Engineering leader and software engineer with a decade of experience. As a people manager, I focus on leading engineers with an emphasis on individualized career growth, sustainable workload management, and building the kind of culture where people do their best work together.

I have led platform engineering teams whose efforts multiply engineering productivity across organizations, including AI-native infrastructure and agentic workflows. As a senior engineer, I have focused on building backend systems, ranging from authentication domains for B2B SaaS companies to financial domains in the events and ticketing industry.

10+ Years of experience
University of Kentucky B.M. Viola Performance
Epicodus Full Stack Development

Experience

Engineering Manager Sure, Inc.
August 2021 – Present · Remote
  • Shaped organization's AI infrastructure roadmap, positioning my team as the platform team responsible for AI code verification tooling, regression detection, and agentic sandbox environments—directly supporting an AI-native development culture.
  • Championed the team's evolution from a stream-aligned team to a developer-experience focused platform engineering team; defined roadmap for data/platform sharding, policy capacity improvements, and authentication security initiatives.
  • Guided evolution of staff engineering roles towards divisional-level impact, establishing clear team goals and career development frameworks for individual contributors.
  • On-boarded three new engineers and mentored tech leads; coached junior engineers through complex architectural decisions and supported their RFCs and architecture proposals.
  • Established incident response framework with prioritization, contingency approaches, and team SLAs to improve system reliability and customer outcomes.
  • Led workshops and recurring demos to on-board engineering teams to a CLI tool for spinning up the full platform in a local Kubernetes cluster.
TypeScriptRustTerraformAWSProject ManagementCircleCI
Senior Software Engineer · Tech Lead Sure, Inc.
Remote
  • Architected a Rust-based CLI tool that provisions full-stack Kubernetes environments for local development and CI, enabling the engineering organization to run the entire Sure platform locally with a single command.
  • Increased active policies on platform by 12x via a migration pipeline that renewed policies into the Sure platform, adding ~$20M in additional Gross Written Premium; built features to migrate Okta accounts and integrate with third-party API for physical mail.
  • Leveraged event-driven technologies (AWS EventBridge, RabbitMQ, Celery) and resolved database lock contention to improve concurrent policy creation capacity from 20 to 150+ requests.
  • Reduced cross-service regressions by 50% with a Playwright end-to-end test suite covering critical business flows.
  • Sped up CI/CD pipelines by 200% by building reusable CircleCI orbs with caching and staged Dockerfiles.
  • Drove authentication initiatives (account creation redesign, SSO for new client integrations); created AWS infrastructure using EKS and GitOps for critical Zillow home insurance product.
PythonFastAPIRustWASMRabbitMQCeleryHelmKubernetesIstioPlaywrightPostgres
Software Engineer Eventbrite
February 2019 – August 2021 · Nashville, TN
  • Built billing systems handling money movement to and from customers, including APIs and web front-ends powering payment and reporting components in a high-scale, data-intensive SaaS platform.
  • Designed and built a real-time immutable financial transaction log producing high-quality data tracking all money flow across the platform, used by internal teams and third-party auditors.
  • Built an automated bookkeeping system responsible for double-entry accounting of all transactions on Eventbrite.
  • Built a real-time balance service providing aggregated financial data powering customer-facing and internal application features.
PythonDjangoDockerSOAMySQL
Software Developer Juice Analytics, Inc.
May 2017 – February 2019 · Nashville, TN
  • Lead developer for 10+ data visualization applications, working closely with cross-functional stakeholders to understand their data needs.
  • Increased the company's development capacity by building a CLI tool to rapidly scaffold and create data applications.
  • Created applications that increased word-of-mouth recommendations, leading to a 13% increase in clients.
  • Led regular agile ceremonies and mentored new developers on building data applications.
PythonDjangoRedshiftD3.jsDocker

Skills

Languages

Python · Rust · SQL · TypeScript · Terraform

Frameworks & Tools

Django · FastAPI · RabbitMQ · Celery · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker · Kubernetes · Helm · Istio · Playwright

Cloud / AWS

ECS · ECR · RDS · S3 · SSM · EventBridge

Practices

REST APIs · TDD · CI/CD · Agile/Scrum · OOP

AI Tooling

Multi-Agent Collaboration · Cursor · Opencode

Get in touch

I'm always open to interesting conversations — about software engineering, DERs (distributed energy resources), or rye bread.