Are you okay if this site uses Google Analytics cookies?
Christian Brown's avatar

Christian Brown

Engineering Manager

Location icon London, UK

Engineering Manager with 20 years in software engineering, 15 years in technical leadership, and 9 years managing engineers. Experienced in leading distributed full-stack teams, scaling high-traffic web platforms, improving operational reliability, and delivering revenue-critical systems.

Work experience

  • Built and led a distributed team of 10-12 full-stack engineers across the UK, Canada, Germany, and Cyprus, owning shipping purchase journeys on the web that handled 30m+ monthly purchases.
  • Owned desktop and mobile web experiences within a broader shipping purchase domain spanning web and native mobile apps, together generating ~US$530m in annual revenue, and moving ~US$8b of merchandise.
  • Built a high-performing team through strong ownership, clear expectations, direct and actionable feedback, tailored coaching, and effective weekly 1:1s.
  • Set the team’s technical direction, balancing delivery commitments with long-term architectural health, scalability, maintainability, and operational risk reduction.
  • Reduced production outages by over 75% in the first year, and significantly decreased customer-reported defects. Shifted the team from project-based delivery to a stronger product and customer mindset, improving customer satisfaction by 20%.
  • Partnered with Product, engineering leadership, and business stakeholders on prioritisation, roadmap trade-offs, delivery timelines, and six-month capacity planning cycles.
  • Led hiring for the team, contributed to wider Shipping hiring, participated in annual calibration and promotion panels, and created a well-regarded onboarding programme.

Tech stack: TypeScript/JavaScript (React, Node.js, Playwright), Java, Kotlin, Oracle, Kubernetes, CI/CD with Jenkins.

  • Managed the Video Engineering team, leading four back-end engineers across the US and UK alongside contractors from South America, and led delivery of a new SaaS video encoding and playback platform designed to support up to two billion play sessions per year.
  • Held engineering ownership for video-on-demand encoding with Bitmovin, live video and dynamic packaging with AWS Elemental, CDN delivery with Fastly, playback with Video.js, captioning with Rev, analytics with Mux, and custom digital asset management, ads integration, and content distribution capabilities.
  • Led the migration of major US media brands including CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot, GiantBomb, and TV Guide onto the new platform.

Tech stack: TypeScript/JavaScript (React, Node.js, Express), Go/Golang, Postgres (Amazon RDS), PHP (Symfony, WordPress), Bitmovin, AWS Elemental, Fastly, Video.js, Mux, CircleCI, AWS, GCP, and Terraform.

  • Played a key technical and organisational role in transitioning systems from ViacomCBS to Red Ventures, serving as a core member of the migration working group and collaborating with product leadership on vendor evaluations, transition milestones aligned with the Transition Services Agreement (TSA), engineering delivery planning, and stakeholder coordination across both organisations.
  • Led back-end engineering and architecture for a video-on-demand (VOD) platform supporting up to one billion annual video play sessions, extending platform capabilities to meet post-acquisition needs.
  • Eliminated an external content management vendor, delivering ~US$430k in cost savings in the first year, and ~US$275k annually thereafter.

Tech stack: PHP (Symfony), Go/Golang, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, GCP, Bitmovin, TypeScript/JavaScript (Video.js), Fastly, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Jenkins.

  • Led a team of four direct reports across the US and the UK, reporting to the VP of Engineering. Served as one of three engineering leaders responsible for the CMS, APIs, and core technology stack powering 10+ CBS web properties, including CBS News, CBS Sports, and CNET, collectively serving ~190 million unique visitors per month.
  • Established the team as subject-matter experts for all video-on-demand (VOD) workflows, including transcoding, ingestion, digital asset management, captioning and transcription, publishing, and distribution across internal platforms and third-party vendors. Designed an alternative in-house solution to a vendor’s pay-per-play system, saving ~US$500k annually.

Tech stack: PHP (Symfony), Go/Golang, Python, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Memcached, GCP, AWS, MPX/CVP, TypeScript/JavaScript, Material Design, Fastly, Akamai, Vagrant, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins.

  • Served as tech lead in the international CMS team, maintaining the CMS UI and API stack powering the company’s web properties in local markets.
  • Co-developed a new responsive CMS experience for the combined global version of ZDNet in two months.
  • Joined the global CMS team responsible for building a single CMS to power all US and international websites – spanning news, sport, tech, gaming, and food verticals.
  • Led the integration of online video functionality to support CBS’s broadcast brands starting with a 6-week assignment in San Francisco.
  • Built and maintained features for the UK editions of CNET and ZDNet, while supporting US engineering teams on GameSpot, TV.com and TechRepublic.
  • Co-developed a framework to solve common platform challenges, including routing, caching, and CDN integration. Trained French and German engineering teams on the framework in Paris and showcased the team’s work at an off-site event in Singapore.
  • Built and maintained CRM, billing, HR, and B2B ordering systems. Led the integration of tools developed in a previous role into the official CRM application. Awarded “Hardest Worker of the Year” in 2006.
  • Served as a Team Leader in the billing and technical support contact centre, coaching junior staff, resolving escalated technical issues, and coordinating network-wide fault reports with the Network Operations Centre.
  • Created a suite of web-based tools to improve support workflows, including a theoretical maximum DSL speed estimator based on copper-wire attenuation and raw cable data. The tools were adopted by support teams across multiple contact centres across Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, contributing to the “Most Innovative Staff Member” award in 2005.
  • Managed desktop and server support, and developed, hosted, and maintained METS websites, intranet, and internal web-based tools.
  • Provided web development, hosting, and domain name management services for small to medium businesses, ranging from microsites and intranets to full shopping portals.

Education

  • Majored in Electronic Business and IT Systems.