• chris williams

    • About

    I am passionate about interface design and engineering. My background in genome sequencing led me to develop a love for data visualization which opened the door to frontend engineering and digital product design.

    I have 10+ years experience crafting complex data visualizations and data tools that power data intelligence at many major companies, and have contributed to several large open-source software projects.

    Skills

    • Frontend & data vis engineering (TypeScript, CSS, React, GraphQL, d3, WebGL, redux)
    • Figma/Illustrator design & prototyping
    • Data analysis (SQL, Machine Learning, stats)
    • Product management
    • User research
    • Full-stack engineering (Python, Java, Ruby)
    • Academic & blog post writing

    Experience

    Airbnb

    Staff Engineer – Data Visualization • 2016-current (6 years)

    • Co-created and was the tech lead for a 10-person Data Experience (DX) team, consisting of engineers, designers, product managers, and researchers with domain expertise in data
    • Drove collaborations with 20+ teams across most Airbnb orgs, to build a wide range of 30+ internal data products
    • Unified Airbnb's visualization infrastructure by co-creating visx, an open-source collection of low-level visualization components for React

    Interana – Interactive Analytics

    Frontend engineer • 2015 - 2016 (1 year)

    Acquired by Twitter in 2020, Interana is a fast and scalable event-based analytics solution to answer critical business questions about how customers behave and how products are used. Used by Asana, Bing, Microsoft Azur, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, SurveyMonkey, Uber, Salesforce, Tinder, Comcast, Sonos, and others.

    I led development of all visualization-related features, including exploration and dashboarding.

    Insight Data Science

    Fellow • Aug - Nov 2015 (4 months)

    Insight is a "bootcamp" program in the Bay Area to help quantitative PhD "fellows" transition into data and data science roles at top tech & biotech companies. Fellows uplevel their skills in Python, SQL, statistics, and machine learning with a personal project which forms the basis of interviews at prospective companies.

    University of California, San Francisco

    PhD Genomics & Cell Biology • 2010 - 2014 (4 years)

    • Developed a novel genome sequencing methodology to understand spatial (3D) gene expression in cells with unprecedented precision
    • Published two papers in top-tier Science magazine applying this methodology to clarify two decades-old problems in cell biology

    Grinnell College

    Bachelor of Science, Chemistry • 2006 - 2010 (4 years)

    Valedictorian, 4.0 GPA