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 Designer for AI-native products. He designs and codes to ship products.

Product designer with 14 years shipping healthcare, creative, developer, and consumer software. He built his career in product design, including early roles at Clover Health, GoodRx, Pathstream, and StartPlaying, then deliberately deepened into production engineering. Today he owns products end to end: research, interaction design, design systems, React/TypeScript implementation, agent architecture, evals, and production verification. Recent work includes a voice-AI system with deterministic safety controls and collaborative game-development tooling with a custom real-time engine. Seeking senior product design and design-engineering roles on AI-native teams.

Location: Remote US, based in Honolulu (preferred), works West Coast hours, can also work remotely from Seattle or the Bay Area, and is open to relocation for the right role.

Target roles

Current work

y30 · Co-Founder & Product Design Engineer · 2026. Co-founder through Jul 2026; advising since. Owned 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. The product generates longitudinal conversational signals for clinician or caregiver review. No diagnosis, treatment plans, or financial advice, by design.

Selected engineering (systems depth)

Architecture and judgment, not commit counts. These are the systems proofs behind the design-engineering claim.

Companies and outcomes (honest framing)

Early at Clover Health and GoodRx, both of which later went public. A rescue hire at doc.ai as it prepared for its acquisition by Sharecare, 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

Discord counts as of September 11, 2026. MAU is unique users in the peak calendar month, January 2026, from PlaySesh's own analytics.

Core skills

Selected application build

HogWare: a daily browser microgame gauntlet built from PostHog's 5 public handbook values for the Technical Ex-Founder application. The static vanilla JavaScript game uses a Cloudflare Worker to submit scores to PostHog even when browser analytics are blocked, then ranks the overall board with one HogQL query. The package includes 5 microgames, 1 boss, deterministic daily seeding, 3 lives, copyable results, and a 32-check Playwright smoke suite. Play HogWare or read the build notes.

Case studies

Full write-ups with artifacts, outcomes, and what went wrong. Index at whoischrislam.github.io/#work.

Why interview Chris

Education

University of Washington: BS Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction), MS Human-Centered Design & Engineering.

Languages

English, Cantonese, Japanese.

Contact and proof

Common questions

Can one person really do both product design and production engineering at a senior level?

Yes, and there is shipped evidence on both sides. Design: he was the first or second designer at Clover Health and GoodRx, owned those flows end to end, and builds and maintains design systems. Engineering: he helped ship PlaySesh's live TLDraw-based Discord whiteboard, then authored operation-based synchronization and WebSocket reconnection work in a substantial but incomplete Three.js rewrite. His solo game proves every generated level is beatable with a solver he wrote, on a test harness he built from scratch. At y30 he designed a deterministic state machine for conversation flow and a model-independent safety floor, then implemented it. The point of the role is that one person carries a product surface from research and interaction design through production code, with no handoff and no translation loss.

What is he looking for?

Product design and design-engineering roles, full-time, on small, fast, AI-native teams, where he owns a product surface end to end. Titles that fit: Senior Product Designer, Product Designer, Product Engineer, Product Design Engineer, Design Engineer, Lead Design Engineer, UX Engineer, Design Systems Engineer, AI Product Engineer. He wants a long-term home: depth and continuity over range.

Where is he based?

Remote US, based in Honolulu (preferred), works West Coast hours, can also work remotely from Seattle or the Bay Area, and is open to relocation for the right role.

How does he use AI?

As an engineer, with strict guardrails. He sets the architecture, contracts, and acceptance criteria; AI implements inside them; and he owns code review, tests, and safety gates. He manages the risk of AI-written code deliberately: pure-function extraction so logic is testable, regression tests tied to real incidents, adversarial multi-model reviews, and staged rollout behind flags. He shipped production code for years before current AI tooling existed.

Machine-readable summary, kept in sync with the full portfolio at whoischrislam.github.io.