Chris Snijder

Engineering Team Lead (People & Delivery)

• Contact information
• (+31) 6 – 42 55 99 61
• jobs@chrissnijder.nl
• F129 A2D8 E58A 1F4E D623
• github.com/SnijderC
• cv.chrissnijder.nl

Leadership Profile

Engineering leader with a strong technical background and a people-first mindset. Experienced in building and growing teams in scale-up environments, with a focus on ownership, delivery, and sustainable technical quality.

Known for being approachable and trusted, I support engineers through mentorship and clear feedback, creating psychological safety while holding teams to high standards of ownership and delivery.

I operate comfortably across engineering, architecture, and delivery. With a strong hands-on background, I work well with ambiguity and translate loosely defined goals into concrete infrastructure and code decisions. I balance pragmatism with maintainability, designing systems that are solid today and able to evolve over time. I abstract technical detail into clear direction, trade-offs, and priorities for peers, product, and leadership.

Leadership & Management

Leadership & People

• Hiring and interviewing engineers with a focus on ownership, independence, and team fit, building balanced, high-trust teams that operate smoothly under pressure.
• Coaching and mentoring engineers through regular 1:1s, feedback, and growth conversations, supporting individuals in setting and owning their own goals.
• Leading with an empathetic leadership style while maintaining clear boundaries, expectations, and accountability.
• Applying situational leadership, adapting my approach to direct, coach, or empower depending on individual needs and context.

Feedback, Coaching & Conflict

• Giving clear, constructive feedback using structured approaches (e.g. DESC, STAR), grounded in respectful, outcome-focused dialogue (NVC).
• De-escalating tension between peers and direct reports by grounding discussions in facts, impact, and needs.
• Handling difficult conversations directly and responsibly, including performance feedback and hard decisions, with clarity, fairness, and respect for roles and boundaries.

Delivery, Change & Decision-Making

• Owning delivery outcomes in environments with evolving priorities and constraints.
• Leading teams through change by providing context, recognising different responses to change, and maintaining focus and momentum.
• Balancing short-term execution with long-term organisational and technical health.

Talent, Growth & Culture

• Experience using talent frameworks (e.g. 9-grid) to assess performance and potential.
• Contributing to succession planning and sustainable team growth.
• Actively contributing to a healthy, inclusive team culture, with clear support for DEI initiatives and employee-led groups.

Communication & Alignment

• Acting as a bridge between engineering, product, and leadership.
• Abstracting technical detail into clear direction, trade-offs, and decisions.
• Aligning teams around shared goals, responsibilities, and expectations.

Experience

Geniox — Engineering Team Lead (People & Delivery)

Geniox provides highly reliable, globally deployable connectivity using redundant, multi-homed LTE and satellite links, supporting customers operating in remote and mobile environments.

As the company expanded into a high-security public-sector domain, I was responsible for building and delivering the management and backend systems supporting this infrastructure, including hiring and developing engineers. I delivered secure and reliable software for sensitive, non-public projects under strict requirements around availability, data protection, and controlled deployment.

Leadership & Delivery

• Hired, coached, and, where necessary, exited engineers to maintain a high-trust and accountable team culture.
• Delivered multiple projects end-to-end, translating loosely defined strategic goals into concrete execution plans while balancing speed, risk, and long-term maintainability.
• Worked closely with peers in multi-disciplinary teams to deliver integrated network and software solutions.

Systems, Architecture & Security

• Designed and delivered a highly available, on-prem observability and control platform using a Grafana-based stack (Prometheus, Redis, Python, event-driven components), deployed and maintained across dozens of locations using Ansible.
• Designed and implemented backend and management systems for fleets of distributed, field-deployed devices, including decentralised device management and brokered messaging, operating in unreliable network conditions.
• Implemented secure communication and access patterns using VPNs, TLS, smartcards, and cryptographic controls.
• Worked hands-on across the stack, including React-based front-ends and MongoDB-backed services.
• Delivered R&D and proof-of-concept work on specialised hardware and IoT edge devices, leading prototype product development across hardware, enclosure design, and software integration.

Deliverect

Deliverect offers a software platform that streamlines the management of online food orders for restaurants. It consolidates orders from multiple third-party delivery platforms (like Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub) into a restaurant’s POS system for greater efficiency.

2022 – 2025 Software Development Team Lead

I led and grew software development teams at Deliverect, and later took responsibility for the Dispatch team. Dispatch enabled customers to replace marketplace-managed delivery with third-party delivery, directly impacting cost, control, and customer experience. The product had an existing codebase and active customers, but required focused leadership to stabilise delivery, sharpen direction, and scale based on customer needs and data-driven insights. Under my leadership, the team refined the product, expanded its capabilities, and delivered new customer-facing solutions, including the Courier app for managing in-house delivery fleets.

I established an 80–20 mindset across the team to guide prioritisation and delivery, focusing effort on the highest-impact work and iterating based on data insights and customer feedback.

Leadership & Delivery

• Led a mixed-discipline team of 8 engineers (Backend, Frontend, UX, Mobile), conducting regular 1:1s, supporting goal-setting, and developing individual growth paths.
• Acted as hiring manager for the location, interviewing over two-thirds of engineering candidates and contributing to hiring decisions across other locations.
• Guided Personal Improvement Plans for underperforming team members, combining clear expectations with active coaching and follow-through.
• Led the team to deliver a mobile application and supporting backend from proof of concept to production in approximately two months, meeting a fixed external deadline.
• Established clear ownership and delivery discipline within the team in a high-growth, high-change environment.

Impact & Outcomes

• Increased third-party delivery jobs per month by 400% year-over-year (KPI).
• Improved delivery reliability by iteratively eliminating failure modes, achieving a near-100% success rate on delivery jobs (KPI).
• Reduced revenue loss by introducing resilient retry strategies to handle third-party errors and unexpected operational failures.

Systems & Architecture

• Participated in and helped shape an RFC-based architectural decision process, contributing to the documentation, review, and approval of platform-level changes.
• Directed and coordinated architectural work across the team, ensuring alignment with platform standards and long-term maintainability.
• Enabled data-informed decision-making by leading the design of a real-time data collection pipeline streaming operational data into BigQuery.
• Oversaw the introduction of stateless testing approaches for database-heavy applications (Postgres, MongoDB, HashiCorp Vault).
• Led exploratory work on sentiment analysis for customer reviews using machine learning techniques (Gemini, spaCy), and guided its refinement and adoption into production to support data-informed prioritisation.

2021 – 2022 Senior Backend Developer

During a period of rapid growth, I operated as a senior individual contributor while taking on additional responsibilities around onboarding, interviewing, and technical alignment. At peak growth, I conducted over 30 interviews per month and contributed to scaling teams across the Ghent office and the newly opened Amersfoort location.

• Contributed to an RFC-based architectural review process, documenting and reviewing platform-level design decisions.
• Streamlined developer onboarding by improving setup scripts, resolving Docker-related issues, and ensuring a reliable, repeatable local development environment.
• Built an internal library to abstract OAuth logic, improving consistency and reducing duplication across services.
• Played a key role in migrating secrets management to HashiCorp Vault.
• Designed and implemented integrations for order ingestion from external ordering platforms.
• Improved and extended the REST-based partner API.
• Increased performance of computationally intensive components through optimisation and cross-instance caching.

Greenhost

2015 – 2021 — Full Stack Developer

Greenhost provides sustainable hosting and cloud services, alongside grant-funded projects focused on human rights and digital privacy. Over multiple years, I worked across customer-facing platforms and internal systems, contributing to both product development and operational reliability in a security- and privacy-sensitive context.

• Developed and maintained core customer-facing applications and internal tooling across the stack.
• Contributed to security-focused projects involving TLS, certificate management, and secure system design.
• Supported and improved deployment and operational workflows to increase reliability and maintainability.
• Took part in cross-functional initiatives, including office relocation and workspace design, gathering input and translating it into practical outcomes.

Volunteer Experience

Bits of Freedom Volunteer (2014 – 2015)

Led and coordinated a large group of volunteers contributing to public-facing digital privacy and security initiatives.

Early Career

ReleaseTMS — Software Developer (2009 – 2015)

Worked full-time on the development and operation of telecom-focused SaaS and on-prem systems. My work focused on building and maintaining data pipelines, transforming and normalising data from diverse sources into relational databases, and supporting core product functionality.

This role marked the start of my professional software development career, focused on backend systems and data processing.

2ml IT Solutions — System Administrator (2008 – 2009)

Provided system and network administration for Windows, macOS, and Linux environments, supporting small to mid-sized organisations.

CARD Services B.V. — Service Engineer / System Administrator (2006 – 2008)

Provided on-site support and system administration for mixed Mac and Linux environments in professional organisations.

Royal Navy (Radar Division) — Intern (2005)

Completed an internship supporting maintenance and modification of radar systems for maritime platforms in a high-reliability, safety-critical context.

Technical Context

Backend & Data

Python, FastAPI, Django, SQL, sRedis, MongoDB, Postgres, Event-driven systems

Frontend

JavaScript, TypeScript, React

Infrastructure & Delivery

Docker, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Ansible, Git

Security & Platform

OAuth, PKI, Vault, TLS, VPNs

Hardware & Physical Product Experience

Experience working on end-to-end prototype products combining software, hardware, and embedded systems, particularly in IoT and edge contexts. Comfortable bridging software, electronics, and physical design to de-risk concepts early and support production-oriented decision-making.

Education

Telematics & Electronics Engineering (2001 – 2005) Deltion College, Zwolle

Hobbies

• 3D printing
• DIY & woodworking
• Guitar & Ukulele
• Pizza making
• Espresso & Latte Art

Disclaimer: Can’t recommend my musical skills, try my pizza or coffee instead.