Profile
81% UI Engineer / 13% UX Designer / 4% Ninja / 2% MagicianContact
- buzzyapyear@gmail.com
- www.chrisyap.com
A Little Ice-Breaker
I'm a serial startup engineer. I've been a founding engineer and experienced building things from the ground up. I've enjoyed contributing to the growth of companies from the earliest stages, to the hard work of "crossing the chasm" and the march to IPO-readiness. I've loved building things in code as well as leading teams and helping to grow the careers of my fellow engineers.
Recent Experience
Ngrok | Engineering Manager
- San Francisco, CA
- November 2025 - Present
- www.ngrok.com
Ngrok is an API gateway and unified ingress platform that streamlines how developers and enterprises securely connect their applications—whether local or cloud-hosted—to the internet. It achieves this by creating secure, persistent tunnels from its global edge network, effectively eliminating complex networking configuration while providing essential zero-trust security features like OAuth and IP restrictions.
More TBA...
Checkr | Engineering Manager
- San Francisco, CA
- October 2018 - November 2025
- www.checkr.com
Checkr provides modern and compliant background checks for global enterprises and startups.
At Checkr I performed in a number of roles, including Staff Software Engineer and Engineering Manager.
- Architect and lead a multi-year initiative to migrate the legacy AngularJS customer dashboard application to React. Invisible to the customer, and without interrupting the product roadmap.
- Hire and grow a team of full-stack engineers to form a UI Platform team to implement high-quality front-end codebases and tools for internal engineer consumption.
- Oversee the creation of a UI design system to scale high-quality and consistent user-experiences across the company's products.
- Lead an iniative to modernize and scale embeddable user-experiences in partner applications.
- Oversee an initiative to redesign and rebuild the company's core customer dashboard user-experiences to optimize for the needs of a broad cross-section of customer user personas, from small and medium sized businesses to large high-volume enterprises.
- Drive the assessment and procurement of external tools and services to support the needs of the broader engineering organization.
Lytmus | Software Engineer
- San Francisco, CA
- September 2012 - October 2018
- www.lytmus.io
October 2018 - Lytmus has been acquired by Checkr
Lytmus was a bleeding-edge technical assessment platform, built with an
intent to revolutionize hiring by leveling the playing field for
candidates and employers with deep, objective and realistic
assessments. I was hired as the first employee to work with the
founders to bring the vision to life.
- Lead engineering of all product user-interfaces
- Conceptualize and design product user-experiences
- Contribute to specification of a comprehensive API to harness the power of the platform
- First employee, founding team
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
Betabrand | Software Engineer
- San Francisco, CA
- January 2012 - September 2012
Watchwith | Web-Applications Engineer
- San Francisco, CA
- September 2010 - January 2012
VoxPop | Lead Web Developer
- San Francisco, CA
- January 2010 - October 2010
Flowgram | Software Developer
- San Francisco, CA
- October 2007 - January 2009