CHASE PIERCE
Software Architect | Engineering Executive
Remote | syntaqx@gmail.com
https://www.syntaqx.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/syntaqx/ | https://github.com/syntaqx

SUMMARY
Engineer first and leader by consequence, with 20+ years across consumer platforms, high-growth startups, and the platforms businesses run on. I architect distributed systems that ship faster because the patterns make the right thing the easy thing, and break less because the platform prevents the fires. I've worked every layer of the stack, from the UI users touch to the infrastructure underneath, at both ends of the spectrum: platforms serving hundreds of millions of daily users, and greenfield builds taken from first commit to running the business, including money-moving systems where correctness isn't negotiable. Still in the PRs and the hard design calls, because the title is downstream of the work.

SKILLS
Architecture: System design, distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, greenfield platforms, legacy migrations, multi-cloud infrastructure
Leadership: Technical strategy, architecture review (RFCs), incident command, service level objectives (SLOs), engineering KPIs, SDLC design, mentoring
Languages: Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Bash
Databases: Postgres, CockroachDB, Timescale, ClickHouse, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, Redis
Messaging & APIs: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, AMQP/RabbitMQ, Kafka, webhooks at scale
Platform & Infra: Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, microVMs, Traefik, Nomad, Consul, Vault
Cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vercel, Cloudflare
Observability: Prometheus, Elastic (ELK), OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty
IaC & Delivery: Terraform, Pulumi, Packer, GitHub Actions, CircleCI

EXPERIENCE
Vice President, Software Engineering | Sep 2025 - Sep 2026
Aptive
Progression: Sr. Director, Software Engineering (Sep 2025) > VP, Software Engineering (Mar 2026)
- Led a 43-person engineering department spanning product engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, and QA.
- Scaled Aspyn's delivery and product offerings to all 76 service centers and 1M active customers while holding a 99.95% uptime SLO; ran incident command across engineering and DevOps.
- Introduced the engineering Forge: scorecards with quantifiable KPIs across reliability, delivery, impact, leverage, and security, holding teams accountable for reviews, rollbacks, and rework, and surfacing engineering health metrics.
- Overhauled the SDLC to cut low-value metawork and let teams ship faster on work they enjoyed more.

Principal Software Architect | Sep 2023 - Sep 2025
Aptive
- Architected and led Aspyn, a greenfield platform spanning seven domains (CRM, Field Service, Pay, Sales, Communications, Licensing, Platform) on Go, PHP, React, Postgres, RabbitMQ, and AWS.
- Delivered a 14-month greenfield-to-GA migration off legacy vendor systems: 76 service centers and 1M customer accounts cut over with zero rollbacks and zero data-loss incidents.

Software Architect | May 2021 - Sep 2023
Entrata
Progression: Cloud Architect (May 2021) > DevOps Architect (Dec 2021) > Software Architect (Oct 2022)
- Led containerization and CI/CD modernization, moving teams onto continuous integration and deployment.
- Partnered with teams to break services out of the monolithic repository and architecture, modernizing a legacy in-house framework, breaking tight couplings, and paying down decades of tech debt while modernizing the UI and UX with React.
Stack: PHP/Laravel, Postgres, AMQP, React, AWS, on-prem datacenter

Principal Software Engineer | Jan 2020 - Apr 2021
TruGolf
- Owned the marketing website and player interactions with E6Connect, stabilizing the existing Go backends.
- Modernized peer-to-peer multiplayer and built an engine-agnostic multiplayer service for E6Golf's online play.
Stack: Go, Postgres, Vue.js, Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Traefik, Terraform, GCP, AWS, DigitalOcean

Senior Backend Engineer | Feb 2019 - Oct 2019
Outdoorsy
- Built a Docker Swarm platform that moved services off Heroku to stateless, Docker-first architecture; owned CI/CD, repo automation, and security tooling, and trained the team through it.
Stack: Docker (Swarm), Kubernetes, Nomad, Consul, Vault, Go, gRPC, Postgres, Heroku, DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP

Senior Infrastructure Engineer | Jul 2018 - Dec 2018
Even
- Defined the engineering infrastructure alongside the CTO as the sole DevOps, security, operations, and IT engineer, building a stable, testable, continuously delivered platform as the team grew.
Stack: Go, gRPC, Postgres, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, CircleCI, Codefresh

Senior Software Engineer | Oct 2016 - May 2018
Imgur
- Designed a scalable microservice architecture to replace the legacy monolith, led the company's migration to Go, and shipped Messaging, Favorite Folders, and Video Upload.
Stack: Go, PHP 7, MySQL, Node.js, AWS, Docker, Chef, Kubernetes, Elasticsearch (ELK), Redis, RabbitMQ, Jaeger, Datadog

Software Engineer | May 2014 - Jul 2016
Riot Games
Stack: Go, PHP, MySQL, AWS, Docker, Packer, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, Hadoop

Developer | Nov 2013 - May 2014
Bluehost

Web Developer | Nov 2012 - Jun 2013
BetterServers

Head of Information Technology | Apr 2011 - Oct 2012
SoftwareMedia.com

EDUCATION
Self-taught software engineer
Writing code since age 11; mentored through a development internship at a local news station as a teenager.

Granite Technical Institute | 2005 - 2006
Concurrent enrollment (grade 10): 3D Animation & Modeling, Computer Programming, Information Technology