Profile Picture of Chris Lyons

About Me

I’m a senior engineering leader with 20 years of experience building and scaling enterprise platforms and engineering organizations, progressing from hands-on senior engineer to Head of Engineering with ownership of delivery across multi-team environments.

Most recently, I served as Head of Engineering at a cybersecurity platform, leading its transformation into a SaaS-oriented offering in partnership with an acquiring company. I owned end-to-end delivery outcomes and execution risk across multiple teams spanning frontend, data science, and systems engineering, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability, governance, and alignment with business priorities. I worked closely with product and executive leadership to guide the organization through acquisition and post-integration delivery while maintaining continuity, trust, and operational stability during significant change.

Earlier in my career, I led UI and application engineering teams as an Engineering Manager and Team Lead while remaining deeply technical. Prior to that, I spent many years as a senior frontend engineer delivering complex, customer-facing platforms and integrations in regulated and enterprise environments.

A defining theme of my work is operating at the intersection of engineering leadership and customers. I’ve frequently acted as the senior or principal-level technical partner for enterprise and public-sector organizations - including Walmart, the U.S. Department of Defense, and PwC - supporting executive stakeholders through deployments, integrations, platform transitions, and high-stakes delivery where reliability, clarity, and trust are critical.

I’m particularly effective in environments that require strong ownership and execution, including:

  • Leading and mentoring multi-team engineering organizations
  • Translating business objectives into pragmatic technical strategy
  • Supporting enterprise customers and complex delivery engagements
  • Navigating acquisitions, integrations, and organizational change

Personal Projects

BestPraxis.dev

BestPraxis is a website I recently developed with Astro (Opens in a New Tab) and launched on Netlify (Opens in a New Tab). This website is a static blog for web development tips and tricks.

From a technical standpoint, this website focuses on hand-crafted CSS (without libraries), accessibility, performance/page load speed, SEO, good design, and a lack of dependecies.

It also employs a well-crafted and dead-simple solution for light/dark mode that takes into account system preferences, but also persists a user's preference in localStorage. The favicon even swaps out depending on the OS settings - try it out!

Similar Artists

Similar Artists is a React (Opens in a New Tab)/TypeScript (Opens in a New Tab) project I put together and hosted on Netlify (Opens in a New Tab). This app allows you to enter a musical artist name and view similar artists with a gauge of how similar they are. Each simliar artist can also be selected to view their most similar artists.

Along with React and TypeScript, this project employs hand-crafted CSS without frameworks as well as utilizes AWS Lambda (Opens in a New Tab) via Netlify's serverless functions (Opens in a New Tab) to obfuscate API secret keys. This fully-frontend app consumes and visualizes the Last.fm Music Discovery API (Opens in a New Tab).

Covid Dashboard

Covid Dashboard is a data visualization project I created with Vue.js (Opens in a New Tab), D3.js (Opens in a New Tab), and Chart.js (Opens in a New Tab) and hosted on Github Pages (Opens in a New Tab).

This project consumes data from the Covid Act Now API (Opens in a New Tab) and visualizes various metrics in interactive chloropleth maps, time-series charts, data grids, and sankey diagrams.

React Reasoning

React Reasoning is a small React (Opens in a New Tab)/TypeScript (Opens in a New Tab) project I put together and hosted on Github Pages (Opens in a New Tab).

This app provides insight into some of the terms and concepts surrounding deductive and inductive reasoning. It's intended to help one describe the quality of an argument given different scenarios.

Poopli.io

Poopli.io is an exciting new tech company that is disrupting the smart tech landscape. This landing page serves as the entry point to a new world of automation and comfort.

From a technical standpoint, this project was a means to explore dependency-free CSS, flexbox and grid, CSS transitions, CSS variables, the parallax effect, static hosting with Netlify (Opens in a New Tab), and Netlify Forms (Opens in a New Tab).