Chris Harvey Tempe, Arizona

Solutions Architect | Engineer & Technology Leader

TL;DR

  • 25+ years building and leading enterprise software across finance, travel, and e-commerce — as engineer, architect, people leader, product owner, resource manager, project manager, and mentor, often all at once
  • Most recently Team Lead & Sr. Software Engineer at American Express (Servicing Intelligence); prior roles at Hawaiian Airlines, Wells Fargo, Emailage, and US Airways/American Airlines
  • Known for taking the hardest, highest-risk piece of a system on personally — e.g., reverse-engineering an undocumented mainframe protocol with Wireshark to build a critical integration
  • Equally fluent in scrappy startups and heavily regulated, multi-team enterprises, calibrating process to the culture rather than importing one playbook
  • B.S. Mathematics (Arizona State University); (ISC)² Certified in Cybersecurity; pursuing AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Claude Certified Architect credentials (2026)

Chris Harvey is a technology leader whose 25+ years in enterprise software span the full delivery lifecycle — engineer, architect, people leader, product owner, resource manager, project manager, and mentor — often carried in the same role at the same time. He most recently served as Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer for Servicing Intelligence at American Express, where he led architecture and delivery for a product area using rules engines and AI models to anticipate customer contact reasons, partnered with Product and Strategy teams to shape the roadmap, assisted management with budget and resource planning, consolidated disparate retention processes into a single unified service, and mentored junior engineers. Previously, he spent over four years at Hawaiian Airlines as Senior Software Engineer for Pricing, leading development of Ancillary Pricing Services and coordinating engineering work streams, feature prioritization, and delivery scheduling across the airline’s multi-year migration from Sabre to Amadeus PSS. Earlier, as Technical Manager for Consumer Lending Technology at Wells Fargo, he led multiple, geographically-dispersed engineering teams spanning North America, Asia, and Europe; owned the multi-year product and technology roadmap; managed hiring, resourcing, and executive stakeholder reporting; oversaw design and development of a loan-pricing tool that improved deal-turnaround velocity — mentoring the engineers who built it — and maintained a five-year record of zero major compliance incidents. He also served as Senior Machine Learning / Big Data Engineer at Emailage, building AWS-based feature-engineering pipelines for fraud-detection models and shaping roadmap sequencing through close partnership with Data Science and Product teams.

Chris’s earlier career included a six-year run as Team Lead for Revenue Management services and the Employee Travel Center at US Airways / American Airlines, where he owned the end-to-end architecture and delivery of the Employee Travel System — a full flight query and booking platform — including a custom connector he built to integrate it with the airline’s VMS mainframe reservations system. Earlier still, he held senior engineering and architecture roles at Apollo Group and Wells Fargo, followed by stints at Maximus, a general IT consulting firm where his project served a K–12 education client; Baseball Express, an e-commerce sporting-goods retailer; Spectrum Technology Group, an internet application consultancy; Hologix, an attribute-based e-commerce platform for large-scale materials and manufacturing companies; and Buzzeo, a student information systems provider serving higher-education institutions. That first Wells Fargo engagement was also his earliest turn owning requirements and project management directly — composing use cases and sizing delivery schedules alongside the architecture itself — a dual role as builder and planner that would recur throughout his career. Across these roles he built e-commerce catalogs, lead-management systems, and CORBA-based student records platforms.

That range extends beyond technology and industry to organizational scale. Chris has worked in lean startups and small shops — Baseball Express, Hologix, Spectrum Technology Group, Evergreen Internet — where he wore every hat and shipped with minimal process, and in large, heavily regulated enterprises — Wells Fargo, American Express, US Airways/American Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines — where success depended on navigating governance, compliance, and coordination across many teams. Moving between those worlds repeatedly has given him a practical sense for when process protects the business and when it’s just friction, and the judgment to calibrate his approach to the culture he’s in rather than import one playbook everywhere.

What distinguishes Chris technically is less the breadth of his toolset than a pattern that runs through his career: alongside leading the overall design and architecture, he has consistently taken the most challenging, highest-risk piece of the system on himself. At US Airways, Chris was responsible for the full architecture and delivery of the Employee Travel System end to end — and when the mainframe reservations system it depended on turned out to have no existing integration path, he took that piece on personally, reverse-engineering the undocumented VMS protocol by capturing and analyzing raw traffic in Wireshark before writing a single line of the JCA connector itself. That willingness to work below the API layer, wherever a standard integration path doesn’t exist, runs throughout his career: batch-based EDI integration with mainframe systems, custom TN3270 and VMS screen-scraping, and low-level work across internet protocols including HTTP, Telnet, POP, SMTP, and FTP — including FTP tunneled through a SOCKS proxy — whenever the problem required building the connection from the wire up rather than relying on one that already existed. At Baseball Express, a full architectural rebuild — database design, object-relational mapping, and infrastructure choices working together — cut average response times from several seconds to sub-second while shrinking the application’s memory footprint to a quarter of its original size. At Emailage, he translated fraud-detection model requirements into production AWS data infrastructure, turning a data-science research problem into a system financial-services clients could depend on in real time. At Wells Fargo, he oversaw design and development of a loan-pricing tool that replaced manual workflows for account managers — mentoring the engineering team that built it — while his oversight of the broader Consumer Lending portfolio held a five-year record with zero major compliance incidents. His range also extends past enterprise backends and into the interface layer and self-directed products: building native application experiences in SwiftUI and Java Swing, and, in one especially hands-on project, a web application that uses OpenCV to read and automatically score paper test sheets — replacing a manual grading process with a computer-vision pipeline he designed, built, and shipped end to end. That same instinct — architecting the whole and personally owning the hardest part of it — carries into his current work: multi-cloud and hybrid system design, LLM orchestration and agentic workflow patterns for production customer channels, and the identity, security, and performance engineering that keep systems like these trustworthy at scale.

Chris holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Arizona State University. He is Certified in Cybersecurity through (ISC)², and is pursuing both the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate and Claude Certified Architect – Professional credentials, expected in August 2026.

Chris’s approach to delivery has always started with the people closest to the problem: leading requirements gathering directly with business stakeholders and end users, driving project planning, and running team stand-ups, while holding QA to a standard that covers edge cases as rigorously as the happy path. That same discipline shows up in how he manages teams and resources — leading hiring, team-building, and resource and budget planning across geographically distributed groups — and in how he develops people, mentoring engineers from junior to senior levels and coaching teams through agile delivery practices. It carries into his personal life as well, where he has developed Java curricula, taught introductory and intermediate-level courses, and leads a technology book club exploring topics in software engineering practice and culture. Across three decades, the throughline has stayed constant: whether the task calls for writing the code, architecting the system, planning the roadmap, managing the team, or teaching the next generation of engineers, Chris takes it on directly.