Chris Evans

Chris Evans is a co-founder of incident.io, a London, England, company whose software helps engineering teams declare, run and learn from incidents and manage on-call rotations from Slack. He was its chief product officer and is now its field chief technology officer.

Early Engineering Work on Infrared Sensors

Evans spent about seven years as a software engineer at a small company that made infrared sensors, first writing embedded code and later the web apps that supported them. By the end he was flying around the world to sell its people-counting systems to supermarkets, and he realized he could have more impact as a bridge between engineers and non-technical colleagues, he told the Humans+Tech podcast. That led him to technical product management at Marks & Spencer and then at MOO, the online printing company, where he led its platform engineering team.

Building Response at Monzo

At Monzo, the British digital bank, he became director of platform and reliability. He built the first version of an incident tool there as "a fun evenings project," a Slack command backed by some Go code on AWS Lambda, and later rewrote it in Python and Django in his hotel room during a PagerDuty conference in San Francisco, California, he recalled on incident.io's founder podcast. Monzo later released the tool as open-source software called Response.

Starting incident.io With Two Monzo Colleagues

During the pandemic, Evans, Stephen Whitworth and Pete Hamilton, who had met as engineers at Monzo, began building an incident product in early mornings and late evenings. At first they pictured a bootstrapped "lifestyle business," Evans said, but when they put up a website for an early version, interest poured in from their network and the first customers began paying. They built the company openly with Monzo's blessing, and Evans said the backing of Monzo's founders meant "a huge amount."

Personal Life

Evans has two children and has said he would hate to build a successful company and miss them growing up, according to incident.io's founder profiles. The same profiles say he built incident.io to fix a real problem and make other engineers' lives better, not to chase a payday.