Chris Connar — Engineering Manager
Who I am
Engineering manager with 20+ years in regulated financial services — underwriting, claims, account opening and advisory workflow. I lead teams building decision-automation and workflow platforms, and I still write code.
BPM and decision automation — Flowable, IBM ODM, Drools, ACTICO Visual Rules, OpenText LiquidOffice — applied to underwriting, claims and advisory workflow.
Open to engineering leadership roles. Remote.
Selected Experience
Northwestern Mutual · 2022–2026
Software Engineering Manager
Led backend Java and frontend React teams of seven engineers and QA on a digital application and payment platform. Modernized mission-critical services to Java 17, Spring Boot 3 and Kotlin, and introduced CaaS CI/CD.
Northwestern Mutual · 2019–2022
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Architected rules and workflow for life insurance underwriting on Flowable and Spring Boot, and migrated business rules off IBM Process Server.
Robert W. Baird · 2019
Business Process Consultant
Recruited back four years after departing. Architected a business-user-editable rules engine within OpenText LiquidOffice — configurable decisioning without a commercial BRMS, and an in-house forerunner to feature flagging.
ACTICO Corp. · 2015–2018
Senior Consultant
Led a developer team as project manager on tier-one banking rules refactoring programs. Built rules and Java solutions across banking, aerospace navigation, pharmaceutical distribution and manufacturing — including pricing automation for a pharmaceutical distributor and flight-operations rules for aviation.
Robert W. Baird · 2003–2015
Intern to AVP, Business Process Engineer
Twelve years, from Baird's first long-term intern to the firm's first Business Process Analyst to AVP, Business Process Engineer. Built straight-through processing for account opening, check and wire transfers — still running in production today — and delivered the Advisory Workflow integration with Envestnet.
Still building
Recent side projects, built outside of work.
hihelloquotes.com
A fan quote voting site with 1000 quotes and a global leaderboard. Built with optimistic UI updates, IP-based rate limiting, Postgres RLS, and a weekly automated sync that pulls new quotes from the stream's quote log.
Bandwatch
A native macOS app that monitors microphone audio for noise violations in chosen frequency bands, automatically recording band-filtered evidence and generating reports for landlords, councils, or mediators. Features real-time spectrum analysis, threshold-based event detection with pre-roll capture, a calendar-heatmap review interface, and evidence export as paginated PDF reports, CSVs, and audio clips.
Pi E-Ink Display
A Raspberry Pi 4 dashboard on a 7.5" tricolor e-ink display showing live weather, a 5-day forecast, and Google Calendar events. Includes a Flask web UI for configuration, a button that displays cats, and a custom rendering workaround for the UC8179 display driver's OTP waveform quirks.