Lee Atchison

Lee Atchison is a software architect and author who helps companies architect and operate AI-powered SaaS at scale. He focuses on four things: building AI into SaaS products, controlling what AI costs to run, keeping AI features reliable in production, and designing for scalability and high availability.

He is the author of Architecting for Scale (O'Reilly Media, now in its second edition) and Overcoming IT Complexity (O'Reilly), and the creator of multiple courses for O'Reilly Media and LinkedIn Learning. He writes the Software Architecture Insights newsletter and co-hosts on Software Engineering Daily.

Lee has spent more than three decades in the software industry. That includes seven years at Amazon and AWS, where he worked on Amazon Retail systems and built AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and eight years at New Relic, where he led architecture for New Relic's SaaS observability platform. He most recently served as CTO at AI company, Product Genius. Today he writes and consults through his own practice, Atchison Technology.

His work has taken him to engineering teams at Nike, Disney, Starbucks, MLB, Deutsche Telekom, and Bank of America, and to conference stages including AWS re:Invent. The thread connecting all of it is a question he keeps hearing from developers, architects, and engineering leaders alike: as AI changes what software work means, how do we stay relevant?

The Software Conductor is his answer.

Lee lives in Seattle, Washington.