About
My name is Chris Schlensker and I am a design engineer with over 19 years of experience in software engineering and design. My career began when I worked as a graphic designer at a print shop when I was 18.
In more recent years I've made the conscience decision to refine my focus to exclusively frontend development as it is highly active space that has a highly visual component and gives me plenty of opportunities to interact closely with design and product teams.
I love working with designers who challenge boundaries of what interfaces can do. I believe that programmers should strive to build the ambitious projects that designers envision, rather than be limited by what is easy or convenient.
I currently specialize in projects that involve high-interactivity, non-traditional interfaces, polished animation, and other "Weird Stuff".
Work History
Principal Fullstack Web Engineer
As a principal web engineer at Endgame, I lead the architecture and establish coding standards for modern web application development, with expertise in Next.js, React, TypeScript, and D3. Collaborating closely with the CEO and Head of Design, I prototype and strategize new product directions while maintaining and enhancing the internal design system to ensure design consistency and efficiency. I also work on improving developer workflows and project management as well as refining testing processes and coding standards, and I create comprehensive implementation plans to streamline project execution and support the broader engineering team.
Freelance Engineering Consulting
As a freelance consultant, I delivered high-quality web solutions for clients ranging from startups to established companies. I specialized in crafting dynamic and visually engaging experiences using web animation, WebGL, D3, Sanity.io, Web3, and Pixi.js. Projects typically spanned 1-3 months, with one extended engagement lasting 8 months.
L6 Lead Design Engineer for Square Banking team
Responsible for implementing and maintaining the design system components for the Square Banking and Capital products used by 60+ engineers and designers. I was also in charge of developing and maintaining all public marketing web pages for the Square Banking launch. These projects have high quality standards, feature rich animation, and are visited by millions of users.
L6 Software Engineer for Square Appointments team
Senior Frontend Engineer on the Appointments Team Lead for the following projects:
- Frontend web infrastructure and frameworks upgrades / migrations
- 'Book with Instagram' integration
- Frontend web product development
- Member of GraphQL working group
- Member of Frontend Summit planning committee
Senior Frontend Engineer
Responsibilities
- Frontend feature development with React.js, D3.js, and Ruby on Rails REST API
- Lead engineer on frontend performance and scalability efforts.
- Maintainer of frontend infrastructure and build tooling (jest, webpack, flow, storybook)
- Contributions to the company blog
- Assisted in maintaining frontend open source libraries
- Product evangelism and community outreach
- Responsible for designing and administering technical challenges for frontend engineering candidates