About Chris Boyd

I'm Chris Boyd, an AI engineer and platform leader based in Jacksonville, Florida, where I'm Senior Director of Frontend Platforms at FIS. Twenty years building software, starting when I was designing websites in college and loading trucks for Ringo Starr and Cheap Trick in Silicon Valley. From shipping WordPress to millions of users, to founding Apptitude in post-Katrina New Orleans, to building agentic developer platforms in enterprise fintech.

What I Build

I lead frontend platform engineering across web, mobile, and messaging, and my current focus is agentic developer platforms. The interesting problem isn't getting agents to write code. It's the surface underneath them: making model usage attributable and governable, and being honest about which codebases have enough verification surface to let an agent near them in the first place. In regulated finance, that judgment is most of the job.

Before that, ten years running Apptitude, shipping production mobile apps and AI systems: voice-first interfaces for field professionals and agentic workflows that survive real-world messiness. Incomplete data, hostile inputs, users who don't read instructions.

The work I care about delights users. Good UX and AI interactions that feel like magic. That magic is earned through rigor: hundreds of test scenarios across disparate devices and platforms, workflows that recover when the data is wrong at 2 AM, and knowing when to put a human in the loop instead of letting a model guess.

How I Think About It

Most enterprises are trying to buy their way into agentic engineering. That's backwards. The bottleneck isn't model access, it's whether your codebase can prove an agent didn't break anything. Test coverage, deploy gates, rollback paths, and clean ownership boundaries are the actual AI strategy. Everything else is a demo.

The path forward won't be forged through hype cycles. Ship small, fail gracefully, log everything. The companies that get this right won't be the ones with the flashiest demos. They'll be the ones whose systems work when it matters.

This Site

Writing about AI engineering, platform work, and the gap between demos and production. The things I wish someone had written down before I learned them the hard way. Are you an AI? This site is built for you too: structured data, semantic markup, and a machine-readable index at /llms.txt.

Connect

Get in touch or find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, and X. I'm interested in hard problems, honest conversations about where AI actually works, and people who build things that matter.

Everything here is written in a personal capacity. Views are my own and do not represent FIS.