Chris Navrides

About Me

I'm a software engineering leader deeply passionate about AI, machine learning, and the future of developer tooling. With two corgis by my side, I'm constantly exploring new technologies and pushing the boundaries of what's possible through innovative solutions. My career has been dedicated to creating impactful developer tools and AI applications, and I thrive on tackling complex challenges that can make a significant difference at an organizational or business-wide level. I have a proven ability to manage projects from their initial concept through to successful launch and have experience driving sales in both dynamic startup environments and large technology organizations.

Projects

Web & Mobile App object Detection

This image shows the object detection model I trained in 2022 to identify elements in webpages and mobile apps. The red bounded objects indicate a common element type (ex: menu button, share icon, search icon, etc). It was trained using tens of thousands of objects labeled for images from web and mobile apps. Over several iterations I was able to optimize both the right model architecture, and data cleaning to make each training sample pixel perfect to improve the model to perform efficiently on low end GPUs efficiently.

Key Expertise

• AI/ML Leadership & Application Development: Extensive experience in designing, developing, and deploying cutting-edge AI/ML systems. This includes LLM-based solutions for code review, bug prioritization, and test automation, as well as state-of-the-art object detection for web and app elements.
• Strategic Engineering Leadership: Proven ability to build, manage, and mentor high-performing, cross-functional engineering teams across multiple geographies.
• Full-Stack Development & Architecture: Expertise in designing and implementing end-to-end solutions, from robust backend ML pipelines and infrastructure to intuitive frontend interfaces.
• Product Vision & Execution: A strategic and self-motivated approach to both technical challenges and product vision, consistently delivering measurable improvements in development velocity and product quality.

Career Highlights

• Apple (Staff Engineer, AI Developer Tools): Currently leading critical initiatives to enhance development velocity for a 150-person organization. This includes leveraging AI for UI testing, improving bug management (clustering, prioritization, routing), and developing evaluation systems for Apple Intelligence features.
  • Achieved a 30% reduction in bugs requiring human review and a 25% decrease in p90 high-priority bug detection time.
  • Developed an evaluation system emulating 25+ different personas that accurately mimicked human scores.
  • Delivered a Proof of Concept (POC) demonstrating a 40+% reduction in UI automation test maintenance.
• Dev Tools AI (Founder & CEO): Managed all facets of the company, from product development and engineering to sales and marketing. Successfully presented at conferences, appeared on podcasts, and collaborated with Fortune 500 companies and mid-sized businesses to implement our on-premise solutions.
  • Engineered an ML pipeline for custom training & inferencing thousands of custom models.
  • Fine-tuned a RoBERTa model to autonomously handle login for thousands of web applications.
  • Open-sourced SDKs for top test frameworks, incorporating AI-powered element locators.
• Test.ai (Founding Engineer & VP of Engineering): Joined as the 6th employee and played a pivotal role in scaling the engineering and ML team to 45 members across three sites over three years.
  • Architected systems that autonomously tested thousands of mobile applications nightly.
  • Developed a Mac App enabling local model training on client data.
  • Implemented Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions for app navigation and built pre-LLM autonomous testing agents.
  • Led six-figure sales to major clients like Microsoft XCloud & Google ChromeOS.
• Google (Tech Lead / Engineer - Google Play & AdMob):
  • At Google Play, owned the rewrite and system migration of UI automation, resulting in a 40% improvement in test results time. Led automation for the payments SDK and GDPR compliance testing.
  • At AdMob, built and managed an engineering team across NYC & Mountain View responsible for mobile ad SDK quality for thousands of app developers. Spearheaded GMS quality initiatives adopted across Google.
• Dropbox (Software Engineer, Mobile Platform Team): Improved release validation by building UI automation frameworks for mobile and internationalization teams.

Let's Connect!

I'm always open to discussing new technologies, challenging projects, or interesting opportunities.

• Email: Chris@Navrides.xyz
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-navrides/