about

Ballance.IT, LLC is a small senior engineering practice led by Chris Ballance, a senior engineering leader twenty years into the work.

The throughline across the career has been the hard stuff: systems where reliability is measured in something other than money. Microsoft (support-authoring platform), Mark43 (real-time emergency dispatch and custody systems used by ~200 public-safety agencies, where the operator rose from senior IC to Director of Engineering), BetterPet (built the internal engineering org from zero to sixty engineers, replatformed the core SaaS off a Ruby monolith), Old Well Labs (a deliberate six-month pivot back to staff-level IC at an AI-native fintech, taken to come back to engineering leadership AI-fluent and sharper).

CISSP-certified. Comfortable with HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2, and state-level public-safety standards as design constraints. Equally comfortable in Java, TypeScript, Python, and the Postgres-plus-Redis stack most of the work runs on.

Engagements scale through a small team of senior on-shore and near-shore engineers Chris has worked with directly. Every collaborator is vetted by Chris and operates under the same quality bar. No junior consultants billed as seniors.

why Ballance.IT and not a consulting firm

A consulting firm sells you a layered team it has to keep utilized: senior partners win the work, junior consultants do it. Ballance.IT sells you a senior team that stays senior throughout. Chris is in the room on every engagement; on-shore and near-shore collaborators are people he has chosen, vetted, and worked with directly. No partner above the work. No junior billed as a senior. No utilization-driven staffing.