It’s a Chimed Life: Meet Emily Anderson

Emily is our Engineering Director in Chicago. Here’s a look at her journey to Chime, what matters to her, and how she’s marrying our San Francisco foundations with her own Midwestern warmth.

When Emily Anderson was young, she was focused on being a mom when she grew up — so she studied education and mathematics. She figured she’d be a teacher — that way, she could enjoy summers off with her kids.

But teaching wasn’t what she’d hoped it would be. In her early teaching days, she says, “I was told that if eighty percent of my students ‘got’ what I was teaching, I could move on — but I couldn’t stop thinking about the twenty percent who didn’t get it.”

So Emily decided to take a break from education and try out working in the sales and nonprofit space. With barely enough money to cover her rent, she wanted to make a change and find a career that felt financially sound. She considered the things she loves — math and humans — and decided to attend a developer bootcamp: “My sister had told me she needed to hire someone who could talk to humans and code — I figured I’d be able to do that if I became a developer.” Upon graduating, Emily joined a startup that was founded by Harper Reed and Dylan Richard, the former CTO and VP of Engineering for the Obama campaign.

When that startup was acquired by PayPal, she was asked to take over Harper and Dylan’s team — a role she wasn’t really excited about at the time. Once they convinced her to give it a try, she loved it. Emily was now an engineering manager at Braintree. After a year, her team moved over to work at Venmo. Throughout her time there, Emily supported Internal Tools, started the risk engineering team, and opened the Chicago office while supporting new app experiences.

With some solid experience under her belt, Emily took a call with our recruiting team to hear about a new position in our Chicago office. “I had really enjoyed opening the Chicago office for Venmo and was so excited to do it all again at a startup.” she says.

Emily was drawn to Chime for our mission and stage. For her, the commitment to giving financial peace of mind to our members — the socially driven aspect of our mission — was something she’d been missing since her teaching and nonprofit days. Getting back to her own values and connecting them with her work was something she didn’t want to pass up.

“I love the stage Chime is in,” she says, “Because hyper-growth can be terrifying but also so much fun.” She explains that it’s hard to keep transparency and community when a company is growing and changing so quickly, but that it’s an exciting challenge. And it’s a challenge she’s taken on before and excelled at: “When I started at Venmo, there were something like 30 engineers, and when I left, there were over 200.”

In her role, Emily supports all risk and member service tooling. For risk, that means figuring out how we handle member identity, how we get to know our members, and how to use what we know about our customers to make Chime’s experiences better, reduce risk, and protect our members from fraud. For member service tooling, Emily’s teams are responsible for creating a tool for our 2,500 users on the platform to use to manage disputes and respond to requests over the phone and email. “Basically, we’re figuring out how to create the best tooling to facilitate a positive — even lovely — member experience for when anyone has an issue with Chime.”

Setting the foundation: Bringing Chime to Chicago

Put plainly, Emily loves Chicago and the Midwest. “I like that when I go on a run in the morning, everybody I see puts up a hand to say hello,” she explains. Though Chicago is a big city, it’s not overwhelming. There are tree-lined streets and access to Lake Michigan. It’s clean.

But for Emily, there’s more to Chicago than its kind attitude and cleanliness. “There’s a big shift happening in Chicago right now — a lot of big tech companies are opening offices here,” she says. She finds the arrival of tech to Chicago encouraging and exciting. “The more tech companies that are here, the more it becomes about something bigger than our individual companies — it becomes about Chicago and building a tech ecosystem here,” she says.

Building a new team and office in Chicago will contribute to the growing tech community, and it’s also an exciting opportunity for new Chi-Chimers. Sure, our Chicago office will be a lot like San Francisco — after all, the foundations upon which our company is built are the same no matter where we have an office. The day-to-day in all of our offices will feel similar, even down to the furniture: “We want Chimers to walk through any of our office doors and feel like they’re at home,” Emily explains.

“Then again, Chicago isn’t San Francisco,” Emily adds. Chicago is different from San Francisco, and our Chicago team will embrace that. “That’s why joining Chime Chicago now is exciting, because the people who join us will help design Chime’s Chicago culture,” Emily says. Informed by our members in the area, Chi-Chimers, and the windy city itself, our Chicago presence will be built on Chime’s San Francisco foundations.

Pairing for success: Onboarding Chicago engineers

“Chime Engineering is built on the foundation that we hire smart, flexible, motivated people,” says Emily. And the thing that sets Engineering at Chime apart for Emily? “We’ve never implemented a process for process’ sake.”

What this means for Emily and her teams is that there’s lots of flexibility for them to work together and decide how they want to operate. “You are in charge of your own destiny in a lot of ways, which is really cool,” she says, noting that this approach is hard to scale, but also that we’re committed to being team-driven, flexible, and aware of why processes are implemented.

While our Engineering team is flexible, it’s still built on some strong foundations. This close relationship between what’s new and what already exists is central to our approach to setting up the Chicago office. “The foundations of what we are going to focus on in Chicago are in San Francisco, along with the people who know the most about them,” explains Emily. So every new hire in Chicago partners closely with someone in San Francisco to onboard.

Every new Chi-Chimer is paired with a San Francisco Chimer — usually two people with complementary skillsets — so they can learn from each other. For two weeks, new hires pair tightly, and after that, it’s up to them whether to keep pairing or move off onto their own. “Even after the partnership is no longer needed as much, new hires will still rely on their partner for random questions and getting familiar with the company — it’s a built-in friend for every new person.”

Emily envisions that when the Chicago team is big enough, new hires will onboard in Chicago, but the current process is a nice way to bridge the gap. And by building the same foundations in Chicago that exist in San Francisco through pairing, every future Chi-Chimer is set up for success.

Setting a precedent: Investing in diversity early

One thing that’s top of mind for Emily as she helps build the foundation of Chime’s Chicago office and Engineering team is diversity. To her, it’s critical that we focus on diversity early, especially in a new office like Chicago.

“It’s important for us to focus on diversity as a company — having people with all different perspectives, coming from all different backgrounds helps us build a more relatable product,” she explains. “Chime is constantly listening to its members but also to our colleagues and employees to bring their incredibly valued opinions of how we think about our product.”

And though we’re in the early days of our Chicago office, Emily insists that that makes diversity all the more important. “The earlier in an office’s design that diversity is included and becomes the status quo, the easier it is, in the long run, to continue building a diverse team,” she says. By setting the precedent that whenever a Chi-Chimer looks around the room they notice diversity, our Chicago team can continue to commit to — and achieve — our goals.

Chime in the time of Coronavirus: Going against the grain

Emily is excited by the prospect of high growth and designing the team and office in Chicago — it’s why she joined us. And she’s also excited about how well set up we are for the current time — both financially and in terms of our product.

“We’re bringing a lot of positive things to the world, like the sweepstakes we did to give away $1,000,000 and the $100,000 we donated to the Equal Justice Initiative,” she explains. “Who else is doing that right now? Nobody — everyone is buckling down and shutting the doors,” she adds.

We consider ourselves fortunate to have a product that can serve millions in the current economic climate. For Emily, she feels lucky to be working somewhere that’s serving the world right now. “The more people we can have to help us do that, the better,” she says.

There’s room: Balancing career and motherhood

Though much has changed since she was sixteen and envisioned her life playing out a certain way, Emily has always stayed true to her inner compass — both in the work she does and her role as a mother. And though her role as a mom looks different to what she had originally pictured, she’s found alignment between her role as an Engineering Director and a mother at home.

“It’s so important to show your kids that there’s always enough love in the world for them, but there’s also room for their parents — you — to have passions and to be part of making the community a better place,” she says. “My role at Chime gives me the opportunity to do just that.”

When she leaves for work in the mornings and her kids ask her, “Why are you going to work?” Emily says she always answers, “I have to help people.” She adds, “For me, that couldn’t be more true than it is at Chime.”

Interested in joining Emily and her growing team in Chicago? Check out our open engineering positions on our careers page.