Christopher Whitten Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Wa, Us

Redmond, Washington, Us

Director of Engineering inside Microsoft’s Interactive Agents & AI organization and Copilot Studio product. Responsible for engineering strategy, direction, and vision for a portfolio of enterprise applications, tools, and SDKs enabling conversational AI SaaS and PaaS integrations used by fortune 500 companies, small-mid size enterprises, as well as government and educational institutions. Key strategic contributor to Microsoft’s Generative AI & Copilot investments, partnering with various leaders and workstreams inside and outside the company to influence and drive investments around application, safety, security, and extensibility of large language models, specifically in the agents & reasoning domain.Microsoft Copilot Studio is Microsoft's conversational AI SaaS platform which enables no-code/low-code/pro-dev/ai users to build autonomous and semi-autonomous agents. Responsible for the authoring studio, its underlying LLM-assisted orchestration system, and associated designtime and runtime tooling. Defined vision, set goals, and led teams whose contributions have contributed a 2.5x increase in MAU and 4x increase in ARR.Microsoft Bot Framework includes open-source, modular, and extensible tooling, services, and SDKs for building virtual agents and conversational systems. Bot Framework powers hundreds of millions of MAU through first party and third-party PaaS scenarios and integrations. Responsible for the entire Bot Framework portfolio and have personally led multiple zero-to-one efforts to market from ideation to delivery, resulting in a 4x increase in active bots and 40M additional MAU running through the platform.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Microsoft Accelerator is a global initiative built to empower entrepreneurs around the world on their journey to build great companies. We work with later-stage startups to provide the tools, resources, connections and expertise they need to become successful companies. Our goal is to help startups mature into enterprise-ready companies by scaling every aspect of their business.

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

Managed a team contributing to both greenfield and in-market product initiatives inside Instructure’s Canvas and Bridge business units.Architected and led execution of various company initiatives spanning multiple product units in the Video Platform and Data Analytics domains. Directed key initiatives in Video Platform and Data Analytics, achieving a 40% increase in user engagement and a 25% reduction in data processing time across 2 major products. Defined standards & architecture around component platforms, architecture, development, testing, internationalization, accessibility, and scalability. Oversaw and established best practices for front-end state management, ui testing, and type systems used across the company. Resulted in a 30% reduction in client bugs caught in deployed environments and a 20% improvement in development efficiency across the organization of 350 engineers.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

First engineering hire at this seed-stage, venture-backed startup. Built the initial engineering team and launched the Customer Insights vertical, contributing to a 2x increase in ARR and expanding the product’s market reach by 30%, differentiating Chameleon in a competitive landscape.

Vancouver, Bc, Ca

2015 - 2017 Architected, built, and launched a pioneering SaaS product in the content marketing space, attracting over 50,000 users in its first year and generating an initial revenue of 2M. Technical challenges spanned real-time web crawling, micro-service fan-out/in coordination, natural language processing, and data visualization across disparate signals.Expanded role to become the managing technical lead for the product after initial launch. Responsible for software design & architecture as well as managing engineering staff of 8 and collaborating on roadmap definition with product & design.2013 - 2015Responsible for the discovery, login, subscription management, and payments components of Moz's suite of SaaS offerings at https://moz.com, as well as business analytics services used by the Executive, Marketing, Customer Success, and Business Intelligence teams. Created a cross-domain authentication system supporting 10k requests/sec, enhancing user experience for over 1M users and reducing login-related issues by 70%.Led a migration of payments processors supporting 40M ARR without downtime or service disruption and reducing involuntary churn by 6% resulting in retaining 2.4M in recurring revenue.Selected by the CEO to lead a special initiative that required re-architecture, stabilization, and scaling of a business critical product called Link Explorer that was falling behind the market. Completion resulted in moving the product from lagging to leading in its market.

Redmond, Washington, Us

Microsoft Studios (Xbox)

Management Science & Engineering

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Computer Science