It’s a Chimed Life: Meet Chris Yammine
When he came to Vancouver from Montreal, Chris Yammine fell in love with the developer community through a series of events. By organizing a monthly company open house meetup, Chris got to meet product and engineering from many of Vancouver’s legacy tech companies and truly understand the depth of community there is here. When he realized that he could be part of a community and learn from the many successful tech companies in Vancouver, he knew he’d found the place he wanted to build his career.
But Chris wasn’t always a developer — he studied biology in university and kept software engineering as a hobby. When he decided to make it his full-time job, he got more involved in the community and has contributed to making it what it is today.
Finances — and beyond
Chris hasn’t always been a software engineer, but he has always been interested in his personal finances. Though many might find managing their personal balance sheets boring, Chris feels the opposite — the intricacies of personal finances have motivated him to stay up to date on trends, best practices, and finance movements like the financial independence and retiring early — or FIRE movement.
In his career, Chris worked on a credit building tool and as a consultant, and it was in the latter role that Chris realized how motivated he is by the impact he makes. He loves to follow up on anything he’s worked on and wants to understand the difference what he builds has made.
So when our Engineering Director, Peter Baker, reached out to him, Chris knew he was interested. “My interaction with Peter felt genuine and I immediately fell in love with the mission of the company,” Chris says.
And when he met Chris Britt, our founder and CEO, for the first time, Chris (Yammine) was sold. “If the founders and leaders are so passionate and so authentic about their goals and aspirations behind what they want to do with the company, it’s bound to precipitate downwards and permeate the company. Meeting Chris solidified that Chime was where I wanted to be.”
His role
Chris joined us as part of the Fraud, Risk, and Member Services team and then transferred to the Growth Team. Since then, his role has evolved to include technical leadership and mentorship for various product launches. Most recently, he’s been working on improving the push notification experience for our members. Chris takes the lead on projects, managing the day to day of product development and technical design.
Chris faces many challenges in his work, most of which center around the rate at which we are growing. “Chime is growing at an insane rate,” he says,” which is interesting both technically and non-technically.” For Chris, this kind of growth is the best problem to have as a business. “It’s forced us to rethink how we do a lot of things on the technical side, and we’re constantly considering what our memberbase will look like next year — if it’s double its current size, we have a lot of major changes to make.”
Supporting members — from across the border
Because Chris works in Vancouver, that means he’s working for an American fintech company in Canada. Because of this, he can’t be an everyday user, since Chime is only available in the U.S. for now. But this detail doesn’t stop Chris from doing his job — in fact, it makes him better at it, and, he says, he enjoys it more.
“I have to try extra hard to empathize with members because I can’t be one,” he says. “The part I really love about it is that the U.S. has a much larger population than Canada, so we see the much more diverse demographic that uses Chime. Despite not being able to be a customer, I find our goals and the market we’re serving to be hugely eye-opening, both as a Canadian and someone who’s interested in finances.”
Making a bigger impact and learning along the way
When Chris is asked what he’s most excited about at Chime, he always points to our growth. With growth come bigger challenges — and, for Chris, all of this means impact. “I’m very impact-driven, so that’s what excites me the most,” he says. “We’re working on serving more and more Americans, which constantly poses new challenges and things to learn.”
With that growth comes a growing team and our new Vancouver office, of which Chris is one of our foundational Chimers. We couldn’t be more excited to have Chris on the team, solving problems, and helping us grow.
Interested in learning more about our Vancouver office? Learn why we chose Vancouver and see our open positions there.
