CCIS graduates are taking on leadership roles throughout the computer science and tech fields, whether as professors, startup founders or company heads. Take for example Chris Lambert (BSCS ’07) who currently serves as CTO of ride-sharing app Lyft.

“The college when I joined was very different than the college when I left,” Chris says of his memories of the college. During his first year, CCIS was still housed in Cullinane Hall; by the time he graduated, the college had moved to its current home in West Village H. “Seeing that transformation was pretty great because it just showed how the [university] was growing and how it was investing in computer science in particular.”

Through his four years at Northeastern, Chris personalized a directed study with Professor Javed Aslam, completed co-ops at Intel and Google, and travelled to Egypt for a Dialogue of Civilizations.

The directed study program allows students to take on research projects with professors for course credit. Chris and Aslam worked on building a search engine for programming languages. While more than a decade has passed since Chris worked on the project, he says one of the biggest lessons from that experience is still relevant: “The value of measuring.”

“Some types of problems that you encounter in computer science are not necessarily done or not done,” he says. “They’re optimization problems that you can always improve, as long as you’re smart about measuring your progress with an objective quality score.”

Two of Chris’ three co-ops were at Intel, where he worked as a software engineer on a team doing microprocessor development for a new chip. During one of his six-month cycles at Intel, Chris took two months off to join a group of students travelling to Egypt for a study abroad led by a Northeastern professor. Once back from Egypt, Chris spent two more months at Intel before returning to class.

His final co-op was at Google, where he was part of a Google Research team building the natural language translation systems behind Google Translate.

After graduating, Chris returned to Google, where he worked until 2011. He spent part of that time with the same team he had co-oped with, before switching over to the mobile team. “I imagined staying for a couple of years and then moving on to something smaller, possibly a startup, but five years later, I was still there,” he says. Among the projects that helped keep Chris at Google was working on Google’s location platform, which is the tool that determines where a user is based on information collected by their mobile device about things like available cell towers and Wi-Fi networks.

“I was pretty fortunate with the teams I got to work on, both having really interesting technical problems but also being made up of great people,” Chris says. “It was just a really great environment to learn and really enjoy and feel great about the work you’re doing. ”

After five years at Google, Chris left the company to work on launching a startup called Roundup, with a friend. The plan was to simplify the experience of planning events from mobile devices and encourage individuals who might not ordinarily organize events to start doing so. Though it ultimately wasn’t successful, Chris says it impressed on him the importance of rapid experimentation with prototypes, and how prioritization was critical when working in a small team.

He joined Lyft as an engineer soon after Roundup shut down. When he started in 2012, the company had just eight engineers. Chris’ first year was spent working on backend systems that helped power the company’s growth. A year later, Chris became Lyft’s CTO. Today, he supports technical teams with architectural decisions and spends a lot of his time recruiting and hiring for the growing company. But when he first started as CTO, a lot of his daily work was the same as it had been during his engineer days.

“I was still writing a lot of code, working to unblock teams and helping move the company forward,” he says. “As we went from 10 engineers to 50 to now, 200, I’ve had less time to write code but I still work closely with our engineering teams, on scalability and marketplace efficiency, in particular. Continuous improvement of our hiring process has also become more important as we work to double the team in the next year. My role has definitely changed a lot, but I still love what I do.”

A decade after graduating from Northeastern, Chris says that the university’s “great balance of academic education and pragmatic experience” provided him with all the tools he needed to succeed. “Northeastern did a pretty good job of preparing me for the workplace,” he says.

By Shandana Mufti