Hello, I'm
simply chris
AI Product Engineer
Leading cross-functional teams, building innovative AI solutions, and mentoring the next generation of tech talent. I bring the power of LLMs and GenAI to software development.
About Me
zero-to-one Product Engineer with extensive experience in developing scalable solutions, leading cross-functional teams and integrating AI.
My Background
Seventeen years at Google, across three offices, shipping across the full stack — from Gmail SRE on-call to leading an AI code-review team. Now an independent AI product engineer, with a side of music and art.
SRE on-call the night Gmail went down globally. Planet-scale reliability has a visceral side you only learn in a pager buzz at 3am.
Shipped the feature that lets you grab a route and pull it onto a different road — JS frontend and C++ backend, end to end. It’s still there every time you open Maps.
Bootstrapped Events on Google Maps with a small team — C++ backend to web frontend, UGC pipeline, operator tooling. Covered events from Rio to San Francisco. Promoted to Staff for it.
Took over the Gerrit team. Five engineers, then ten. Moved from quarterly to yearly roadmaps, ran a stakeholder summit, learned that the hardest part isn’t the code.
Led AutoReview — bringing GenAI into Google’s code review flow. Pivoted the whole team toward AI. Somewhere in that rabbit hole I decided I wanted to build, not just ship features inside a giant.
Left Google to build AI products at the intersection of the things I actually love: code, music, conversation. Droplets is the first — an AI MIDI sequencer you chat with.
Personal Details
- Name: Chris Poucet
- [email protected]
- github.com/poucet
- Book a Mentoring Call
- Interests: AI, Tech, Neurodiversity, Music, Art, Mentoring & Coaching
My Skills
Development
Expert in C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, TypeScript and Rust
AI & LLMs
Bringing the power of LLMs and GenAI to code review experiences
Backend
Distributed systems, scalable infrastructure, and performance optimization
Frontend
Full stack development with modern frameworks and UI design
Languages
Fluent in Dutch, English, Italian, French with German and Spanish notions
Leadership
Technical leadership, coaching, and cross-functional collaboration
My Projects
A showcase of my work in AI and software development, featuring projects like Simply-Lumina and Simply-Maestro.
Simply-Lumina Discord Bot
simply-lumina ✨ is an intelligent AI discord assistant. LLM agnostic, with voice-capabilities, agentic-capabilities over MCP, RAG and google-docs integration.
Droplets
An AI-powered MIDI sequencer that creates musical sequences called "fugues" through natural language conversation. Droplets syncs with your DAW via MIDI clock, supports real-time CC automation with interpolation, and lets you queue looping patterns with quantized timing. Chat with the AI to generate melodies, filter sweeps, and rhythmic patterns that play in perfect sync.
Simply Maestro
A Python-based process manager that monitors, coordinates, and conducts the lifecycle of other processes and code. Simply Maestro harmonizes all aspects of your application's runtime environment through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It provides real-time process monitoring, file operations, version control, and exposes all capabilities as standardized MCP services.
Simply Todo
A modern, AI-enhanced task management application with intelligent organization features. Simply Todo combines traditional todo functionality with smart categorization, drag-and-drop organization, and tag-based project management. Built with a focus on clean design and intuitive user experience.
My Resume
A summary of my professional journey, education, and achievements.
Staff Software Engineer, UTL for AutoReview
- Bringing the power of LLMs and GenAI to the CodeReview experience
- Running a team of x-fn partners and x-org engineers
Staff Software Engineer, EM for Gerrit Team
- Manager of a team of 10 software engineers
- Pivoted team to AI
- Partner with cross-functional roles like UX & PM & stakeholders
Staff Software Engineer, TLM for Gerrit Features Team
- Manager of a team of 5 software engineers
- Moved the team from quarterly roadmap to yearly roadmap
- Introduced eng-reviews
- Organized a summit with stakeholders to define the future of the team
- Partner with cross-functional roles like UX & PM & stakeholders
Staff Software Engineer, TL for Gerrit FE
- Lit, Typescript, HTML, CSS
- Introduced Dependency Injection allowing for a model-based reactive application
Senior/Staff Software Engineer
- Core engineer on Events on Google Maps
- Projects: Events UGC, Operator tooling to create events, crisis events display
- Full-stack development of events on google maps
- Updated the the C++ backend to compute road-closures due to events
- Created operator tooling to allow operators to enter public events
- Designed and led an end-to-end ugc-infrastructure pipeline for events
Senior Software Engineer
- Worked on the new Desktop Google Maps and directions
- Projects: Desktop maps, Draggable directions, indoor maps, Directions infrastructure, Road closures for events
- Implemented draggable directions on Google maps, consisting of both frontend javascript and backend c++ logic
- Optimized the hover-handler for the map from ~200ms to 2ms by writing highly optimized allocation-free javascript