Chris Watson

About

Twenty years in, still shipping.

I'm a technology executive with 20 years across data engineering, infrastructure, payment technology, and email platforms, working from New Zealand and Switzerland for the US market. I've been Chief Data Officer at Blackpearl Group since May 2025.

How I operate

Player-coach. I lead multi-disciplinary teams across data engineering, analytics, information security, and TechOps, and I stay at the keyboard by choice. When there's a security gap in a product, I audit the codebase myself before scoping the fix with my engineers. When we need a new pipeline, I write the SQL.

The moment a technical leader stops understanding the system at implementation level, their strategy starts to drift from reality.

Direction-setting and hands-on building are not in tension; the second is what keeps the first honest. I've written more about this in Why technical leaders should stay close to implementation.

Where I've worked

  1. October 2019 to present · Wellington Blackpearl Group

    VP Platform from October 2019, then Chief Data Officer from May 2025. Blackpearl Group (NZX:BPG | ASX:BPG) is a data and AI company building AI-driven sales and marketing products for the US market from Wellington, New Zealand.

  2. July 2018 to September 2019 · Zürich Nexxiot

    IT Operations Manager, then Head of IT, Processes and Admin at the Zürich IoT scale-up, including ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 audit cycles.

  3. January 2015 to June 2018 · Wellington, then Zürich Black Pearl Mail Limited

    Service Delivery Manager in Wellington, then Global Operations Manager based in Zürich for the email platform company.

  4. October 2013 to January 2015 · Wellington Westpac New Zealand

    Consultant, merchant card acceptance.

  5. 2007 to 2013 Earlier roles

    Systems analysis and technical account management, including payment platforms Paystation, Face, and Netspace, later acquired by Trade Me.

Wellington

I've been based in Wellington since 2020, after several years in Zürich. Off the clock it's sea fishing in Wellington waters: deep drops for hapuku and bluenose, straylining for kingfish.

Short biography for organisers

A third-person biography that event organisers and media are welcome to reuse as written.

Chris Watson is Chief Data Officer at Blackpearl Group (NZX:BPG | ASX:BPG), a data and AI company building products for the US market from Wellington, New Zealand. He leads data engineering, analytics, information security, and TechOps, and is unusually hands-on for a C-suite executive: he writes SQL, audits code, and builds and runs his own multi-agent AI infrastructure. Chris is the author of Blackpearl Group's AI Agent IAM Policy, now in production across the group, a Claude Ambassador, and the organiser of New Zealand's first Claude Impact Lab, a civic hackathon run with Wellington City Council in August 2026. His background spans 20 years across data engineering, infrastructure, payment technology, and email platforms in New Zealand and Switzerland.

For the role in detail, see Work. For what I build outside it, see Projects.