Chris Lam, candidate fact sheet
A plain, machine-readable summary for recruiters, hiring managers, and AI assistants. Full portfolio: whoischrislam.github.io. Resume: PDF.
Summary
Product engineer and designer, 14 years. Designs, builds, and ships end to end with no handoff. First, sole, or early designer-engineer in the room across healthcare, marketplaces, and consumer software. Now co-founding y30, voice AI for older adults. Open to senior IC roles, full-time.
Target roles
- Level: senior IC to staff
- Type: full-time
- Focus: AI, voice, and product engineering; design engineering; agentic systems
- Environment: small, fast, AI-native teams where he owns a product surface end to end and the work is the scoreboard
- Location: remote-first, based in Honolulu, with Bay Area and Seattle availability
Current work
Co-Founder and CPTO at y30, voice AI for older adults and their caregivers. Owns product, design, and engineering. Built a streaming speech-to-text to LLM to text-to-speech pipeline (multi-provider, deep fallback) fronted by a deterministic state machine and a rule-based safety floor that runs independent of any model, so crisis handling never depends on an LLM being healthy. 1,389 commits, 127 test files.
Companies and outcomes (honest framing)
Early at Clover Health and GoodRx, both of which later IPO'd. A rescue hire at Sharecare (formerly doc.ai) during its acquisition, which then went public. The 2014 TaskRabbit rebrand before IKEA acquired it. Iodine was acquired into GoodRx and doc.ai into Sharecare. The signal is repeated high ownership at early or critical stages, not an exit count.
Selected outcomes
- Clover Health (Lead Product Designer, 2nd designer): rewired the nurse home-visit workflow, ~7-8x lift in visit-related revenue, ~2 hours saved per nurse per day. Clover later IPO'd.
- GoodRx / Iodine (Lead Product Designer, first full-time designer): owned the coupon find-and-redeem flow, conversion 2% to 5%. Contributed to GoodRx Research dataviz referenced in the New York Times and on Good Morning America and ABC News. Webby 2018. GoodRx later IPO'd.
- TaskRabbit (Product Designer): owned the Tasker experience and helped across the 2014 rebrand with the PMs. Tasker NPS recovered from about -5 to the mid-50s. Later acquired by IKEA.
- Amazon (User Experience Designer): prototyped the buy-and-gift Prime flow that contributed to 1M+ new subscribers.
- Modus Create (Software Engineer): shipped dark mode for JIRA and Confluence Cloud, 500K+ enterprise users.
- PlaySesh (Co-Founder and CEO): built 0 to 1 solo (1,790 commits, 291 passing tests), grew to 5,120 users across 121 Discord servers, 1,302 MAU, 50-minute average sessions, all organic.
Core skills
- AI and voice: voice agents, LLM orchestration, multi-agent orchestration, FSM/LLM hybrid flow control, prompt and system-instruction design, multi-layer safety, evals and evaluation UX, provenance and human-AI oversight, agent frameworks, MCP, LiveKit.
- Engineering: React, TypeScript, Python, Next.js, Vanilla JS, Supabase, Firebase, Postgres, Cloudflare Workers, Docker, CI/CD, test-driven development, telemetry and instrumentation.
- Design: product design 0 to 1, design systems (tokens, Storybook, Chromatic), UX research, prototyping, information architecture, WCAG accessibility, elder-care UX.
Why interview Chris
- Spans product, design, and engineering without handoff, which is rare at senior IC level.
- AI-native: uses AI agents to implement while owning architecture, judgment, and the safety gates.
- Designs human-AI systems for trust: evaluation UX, provenance, and oversight, so people can delegate to AI and still see and steer what it does.
- Concrete, verifiable outcomes at every stop.
- Has built and shipped real voice-AI systems, not demos.
Education
University of Washington: BS Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction), MS Human Centered Design and Engineering.
Languages
English, Cantonese, Japanese.
Contact and proof
- Email: whoischrislam@gmail.com
- Portfolio: whoischrislam.github.io
- Resume: chris-lam-resume.pdf
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/whoischrislam
- GitHub: github.com/whoischrislam
- y30: y30.ai
Common questions
Is Chris a real engineer or a designer who codes?
A real engineer with design training. The last several years are production-code and architecture ownership: 1,790 PlaySesh commits, 1,389 y30 commits with 127 test files, and the y30 voice and safety stack.
What is he looking for?
Senior IC to staff roles, full-time, on small, fast, AI-native teams in AI, voice, and product engineering, where he owns a product surface end to end.
Where is he based?
Honolulu, remote-first, with Bay Area and Seattle availability when a role needs in-person time.
How does he use AI?
As a force multiplier. He steers product, architecture, and systems and uses AI agents to implement while owning the judgment, code review, and safety gates. He shipped production code for years before current AI tooling existed.