About

Philip Chmalts is a Senior Engineering Manager at Shef with over 7 years of experience in hands-on engineering leadership and shipping code to production for over 30 million students. He is passionate about taking a vision from idea to production and has recently led two teams at Chegg to create a personalized course-based experience, serving over 3 million monthly active users. Philip's specialty is in full-stack Javascript development, but he also has extensive knowledge of AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and distributed systems architecture. He has worked with product and engineering leadership to create a framework for supporting a cohesive, accessible, and internationalized experience. This involved creating a monorepo for the frontend that supports localization, A11y compliance, and supports around 250 engineers contributing code. This framework is currently in production with around 60 engineers contributing, 95% test coverage, and decreased lead time from PR open to production from 2 weeks to 1 day. At Chegg, Philip managed an org of 17 engineers, including two managers, and mentored nine engineers while helping them grow their skills and reach their career goals. He launched nine tier 1 GraphQL microservices in Chegg's first federated graph, resulting in greater code reusability, documentation, and a consistent interface for FE teams. The graph now supports over 100 queries and is used by around 10 teams. Philip also led the highest priority product initiative to create a personalized course-based student experience, involving working with search, data science, commerce, analytics, and product owners. The project was nine months long, launched on time, and resulted in a 6% improvement in subscriber retention. He worked with SRE and Cloud Operations team to revamp AWS infrastructure using terraform and CICD pipelines, resulting in a 50% increase in automation test coverage, hit the goal of 99.95% uptime, and increased deployment frequency by 1000%. This is now the standard for all new projects at Chegg. Philip holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Music Production and Engineering from Berklee College of Music and a high school diploma from Lyons Township High School. His relevant experience spans over 10.36 years and includes expertise in Senior Software Engineering, AWS, CI/CD, Javascript, Microservices, Frontend, Terraform, SRE, Data Science, Search, and infra.