Introducing our Tech Fellow Program: Meet David Lyons, our first Tech Fellow

David Lyons has always taken an innovative approach to his career, starting when he was a university student. He studied computer science and liberal arts with a concentration in philosophy and history — an unusual combination made evident by the fact that he was one of two graduating students with those two majors.

“I originally pursued my majors out of interest, but it turned out to be a superpower,” David says. “I came into my early career with strong writing and communication skills as well as problem-solving and analytical abilities. The combination boosted my early consulting career and has guided how I approach my work ever since.”

Today, David is Chime’s first-ever Technology Fellow. He has shaped our leadership track for individual contributor (IC) leaders within our engineering organization by launching the Tech Fellows program and building the extended IC career path for Chime engineers. Here’s a look at how his aspirations have shaped his career and why this program is an essential step toward setting all Chime engineers up for success in their careers.

Driven by impact, complexity, and the ability to affect change

When David started working as a computer engineer, he was immediately drawn to the intricacies of software development. “Engineering as a whole comes with many challenges and extreme complexity, making it intellectually interesting,” he says.

“Building things with utility — something that does something — was always very satisfying and drew me to the field. I thought about being an electrical or civil engineer, but in those specialties, it can take years to design and build a solution. With software, your time to impact is much faster, which, while it sounds cheesy, is what I enjoy the most about my work: having an impact. I’ve always done my best to affect change because I don’t like feeling like something is impossible to change or improve. It’s what drew me to software development and startups in the first place, and it’s ultimately what’s kept me doing this work.”

Inspired by the possibility of change

David first heard about Chime from a friend and, at the time, the company was small — only 25 engineers or so. At that point, he’d been working in education technology (edtech) for 8 years and was looking for a change: “Edtech is generally 100% mission-driven but often a tough industry to build a sustainable business in,” he explains. “I wanted to do something mission-driven that was backed by a business model; The more I learned about Chime, the more I saw that those two things are aligned here.”

Chime wasn’t just an opportunity to work on a mission-driven product with great business alignment, it was also a role that would allow David to affect a lot of change. “When I joined, we were small and up against a lot of challenges, including the modernization of our development practices, deployments, and tooling — it was a phase in our growth when everything needed to evolve so that we could scale our engineering team,” he says. “I could see the trajectory and opportunity for impact, and it was big.”

New avenues for success: Becoming a Tech Fellow

Upon joining Chime, David started as an IC engineer on the backend scale team, where he gravitated to hard problems in scaling + evolving Chime. There, his skills in backend, large scale systems design helped as the team launched new services, scaled, and migrated to AWS.

More and more, David found himself working across the entire organization with other technical leaders at Chime and saw an opportunity to create a new leadership track for himself and others. “Having been in management myself, I’ve discovered that the classical structure of engineering managers simultaneously acting as architects, people managers, and project managers isn’t ideal,” he says. “It just doesn’t scale.”

In his experience, managers and directors can become spread too thin, and end up weighing in on things that might fall outside of their areas of expertise. “I saw the parallel IC leadership track pioneered at companies like Facebook and Google, and I’ve come to believe that any modern product engineering company needs to go down that route,” he says. “So I spent time fostering that idea and codifying a career ladder that runs in parallel to engineering management at Chime: The Tech Fellows program.”

David has seen many types of senior IC engineers, from the classical academics who invented a language or created a compiler to the technological generalists with an eye for the people side of engineering. “I’ve always felt more like the latter type,” he says. “I believe that an engineering organization is like a living organism and ought to be treated as such.”

At Chime, Tech Fellows spend time advising engineering teams on new projects, migrations, and integrations. “Our role is to help Chimers in building an overall cohesive tapestry of Chime’s backend architecture, services, client-server interaction, and mobile app,” explains David. “That involves a lot of direction setting, context sharing, coaching, and pulling together of the many threads of a complicated and growing ecosystem.”

David and future Tech Fellows will represent the concerns of architecture, code quality, and velocity, as well as act as the bridge between engineering and the broader leadership team. They require a deep understanding not only of engineering but of business priorities, resourcing, and overall company goals.

With an eye to making an impact, David and the team hope that the Tech Fellows role provides Chimers with a path to influence and impact beyond themselves: “I believe that scaling your own influence and impact doesn’t have to involve jumping to management,” he says. “In classical organizational design, at a certain point, if you want to scale your impact beyond what you and your immediate team can do, the only path is to jump to management. The Tech Fellows role shows there are other ways to have that continued influence, leadership, and impact that doesn’t involve people management.”

“Being a Tech Fellow (senior IC) lets me have an impact by doing something I’m really good at — influencing change — without having to spend most of my time on people management. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy managing a team, but by assuming a people manager role, I’d have little time to spend on other areas of engineering, like architecture, systems design, technology processes, and org design. I realized that I care most about those aspects of my work — the Tech Fellow role allows me to focus on them.” — David Lyons, Tech Fellow

A day in the life of a Tech Fellow

The day-to-day varies greatly for David, from being deeply involved as an advisor on a particular project to spending time across the organization. If he’s involved in a project, his schedule will look a lot like he’s a member of that team — peppered with meetings and blocks reserved for coding as he acts as a senior contributor to the work.

When he’s not on a particular project, he works from the broader organizational perspective, having meetings and discussions with Chimers across the company, ranging from engineering leadership to technical groups, individual departments, and teams.

As the Tech Fellows program grows, David and the team plan to have IC leaders for each department to scale leadership. “We can’t expect one central person or group to have context across the entire organization — that just doesn’t scale,” he explains.

One career, many opportunities

While David has only had one career, he believes that within software engineering, there are many opportunities. “If you’re not happy with what you’re doing, change it,” he says. “There are many different paths to leadership and impact if that’s what you want, as well as many ways to become a really good craftsman or language or ecosystem expert — don’t accept being boxed in.”

And when it comes to being boxed in, David suggests not boxing yourself in, either — that staying flexible and always learning is critical. “In this kind of role, it’s important not to be wedded to one technology, framework, or way of doing things,” he says. “I know because I started my career with strong and inflexible opinions.”

Over the course of his career, David has learned to have flexibility and compromise in his opinions, which he believes is important to being in a senior IC position. “It’s much easier to be married to a piece of technology if it’s your singular focus, but that can get messy when you’re working at the intersection of people, technology, and organizations,” he explains. “I used to be the loud guy with the dogmatic technical viewpoints, but I’ve learned the value of bending and influencing softly, of pragmatism, in my IC leadership role.”

Continuing to scale — now as a Tech Fellow

When he looks to the future, David has a lot to be excited about, from Chime’s purely technical roadmap to scaling our engineering IC leadership. “There are so many projects that are near completion that are part of our greater platform strategy; I can’t wait to stitch them together and reap the benefits in terms of speed and agility of product development is going to be amazing,” he says. “There’s so much work that’s happened that has almost been unseen if you’re not deeply involved in the engineering org, so I can’t wait to start seeing the impact of the work and peoples’ response to it.”

As he continues to scale engineering IC leadership, David’s excited to give great talent the autonomy and responsibility to lead engineering and architecture in new ways. “I think we’ll see a lot more organization-wide collaboration when it comes to our technology, and I believe that will only have great results,” he says.