It’s a Chimed Life: Meet Michael Barrett, VP of Engineering Services

Michael Barrett credits his natural anxiety for his career path — though he’s thankful it’s brought him to where he is. “My brain is always thinking about how things might break,” he says, “But it’s not as bad as it seems — it just means I’m very focused on mitigating risk and prepared when things do go wrong.”

His natural dislike of risk or breakage is why Michael started his career in infrastructure engineering: “Well, actually, it started with me, plane ticket to New Jersey in hand, wearing the suit my mom bought me for my first job interview as a systems administrator,” he says. “What followed was the beginning of my career, which I spent as a systems administrator and then managing a data center.”

Later, Michael went on to become the Head of infrastructure and a VP of Engineering at several tech companies. “Ultimately, it’s difficult for your uptime to be any better than the underlying systems they rely upon — which is why I’ve always been drawn to infrastructure and continuously improving resiliency on our systems,” he says. It’s the nuts and bolts, the foundations of engineering and the backend, that are more fun for him.

“It’s exciting to me when things break, to dive in, fix things, and later put them back together and make them even stronger,” he says.

Taking a risk — for a high reward

Though he was attracted to underlying systems and ensuring things didn’t break, Michael stayed away from the two industries he describes as the most high stakes: Finance and healthcare. “I’ve seen what great engineers can do, but it’s a difficult field, and things break in unexpected ways,” he says. “If the results of that are a misdiagnosis of a disease or that someone can’t buy food to feed their kids — those are just nightmare situations for me.”

But when Chime contacted Michael — he’d worked with several of our team members before — he just couldn’t say no to the team or the mission. “I loved the people at Chime already and knew they were some of the smartest in their fields,” he says. “It’s when I saw John Oliver’s episode of Last Week Tonight on payday loans that I knew I wanted to play a part in improving the financial systems behind this country.

What’s more, joining Chime represented an interesting challenge for Michael from an engineering perspective: the company is scaling rapidly and financial services are complicated, and at times antiquated. Most of all, being at Chime represents a way for Michael to stretch himself and his team to do better by our members. “When we have any kind of outage, I look at our members’ responses to remind myself of the importance of what we’re doing,” he says. “Knowing that people are affected by downtime — not able to pay for gas on their way to work, for example — makes me even more determined to build better teams, systems, and processes to make sure it never happens again.”

That’s why Michael is our VP of Engineering Services. He and his team are responsible for empowering every Chime engineer to do what they love — write code that improves our members’ lives — with less effort. “Engineering services, which encompass infrastructure, data, application services, quality, and other things, help make the entire engineering process seamless. Many companies hope that engineering services work will happen organically but the truth is, when it comes to scaling, it requires a concerted effort.”

This focus matters because, done well, it results in a better service for our members. “What Chime provides to our members is only as good as the underlying services that support it,” he explains. “It may not be the most immediately visible to Chime’s customers, but it’s the foundation that makes everything else easier.”

Engineering Services: The teams

Michael’s organization comprises multiple teams. Here’s a look at each of them and the work they do.

Application Services

• The App Infrastructure team develops and implements application services that are used across Chime engineering, such as messaging, to make engineers’ lives easier.
• The App Observability team helps engineers understand what’s going on inside the app quickly and easily by developing the tools and frameworks that provide visibility into Chime’s apps so engineers can respond to and understand what’s going on at all times.

Data Services

• The Data Engineering team strives to make Chime a data-driven company by empowering all Chimers with relevant and accurate data. The following two teams constitute this organization:
• Ingestion: The Ingestion team builds and maintains data ingestion and delivery systems. We build scalable pipelines with monitoring and alerting that ensure high data quality and reliability
• Processing and Serving: The processing and serving team empowers employees to make data driven decisions with confidence by providing highly governed datasets, highly available and scalable data infrastructure.

Infrastructure Services

• The Developer Experience team supports all Chime engineers by building tools and environments to optimize developer productivity.
• The Infrastructure Engineering team creates the tools that allow the broader engineering organization to build, maintain, and scale Chime’s infrastructure. They help automate workflows, create self-service solutions, and ultimately empower developers to get code into production in a fast, safe, and scalable way.

Quality Services

• The Quality Services team strives to provide guidance, frameworks, tools and services to help engineers move quickly while feeling confident that the code they release is safe, stable and scalable.

Engineering Practices

• The Engineering Operations team oversees all programming for engineers — they make sure our teams are engaged and happy. This involves developing our engineering-specific onboarding program to managing career development and training.
• The Incident Operations team makes sure that when there are incidents, that the impact is reduced on both our members and our internal teams, as well as that we learn to avoid them in the future.

The meta solution: removing roadblocks

Ultimately, the entire Engineering Services department focuses on building solutions to empower engineers to be better at their work. While it’s a relatively new team at Chime, it’s supported by the entire organization and has already shown its value. “The value our team provides is what drove me to be an engineer,” Michael explains. “We want to become the lever that others rely on to drive scale and positive growth, and not be a cost center — after all, our job is to remove roadblocks on the way to Chime’s success,” he says.

To that end, Michael and his team work hard to cultivate a supportive, blameless culture that focuses on figuring out the best solutions for everyone at Chime — and for our members. They constantly talk about what the best thing is for our members and how we can scale while providing a reliable, secure, and world-class product.

“The reality is, when you’re scaling as fast as we are, it’s unsustainable to have other teams rely on infrastructure to do things for them,” Michael explains. “Of course, there will always be a need to be met, but our team focuses on narrowing those needs dramatically. That starts with shifting the mindset and empowering others to solve their problems on their own — with tools we build for them, of course. That, in turn, allows us to focus on higher-level needs and continue to polish our amazing platforms and processes, so they continue to get more and more efficient. Not only is that a virtuous cycle that helps our team do their best work, but it also helps us deliver the best Chime possible to our members — removing roadblocks in more ways than one.”

Interested in joining Michael’s team? Check out our open Engineering Services roles on our careers page.