Chi-Kai Chien in

Chi-Kai Chien

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VP, Engineering at Pave
📍 San Francisco Bay Area, United States

Chi-Kai is a hands-on engineering leader with a Ph. D. from UC Irvine, skilled in scaling teams from startups to large tech companies. He specializes in AI, data, and SaaS innovation, focusing on aligning technology with business goals and solving customer pain points. Colleagues describe him as an inspiring, innovative, and detail-oriented manager.

He founded Literal, a B2B SaaS startup described as “Figma meets Mixpanel, ” which visually analyzes mobile app user flows for product and design teams.

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Experience
14 Years
Current Role
VP, Engineering
Job Level
Senior
Location
San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Personality Overview

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Communication Style
Decision Approach
Work Preference

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Priorities

Topics Chi-Kai cares about

AI & ML Innovation
He has led teams in advancing ML and generative AI features at both Pave and Calm, including building embedding-based recommendation systems and ML models for predicting user behavior.
B2B SaaS Products
As the founder and CEO of Literal, a B2B SaaS startup, he was heavily involved in product development, including writing core frontend code and creating Figma/Miro plugins.
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Career

Work history

3-2025
VP, Engineering
Pave
6-2023 - 2-2025
VP, Engineering
Calm
1-2019 - 6-2023
Founder & CEO
Literal
11-2017 - 12-2018
Head of Data
CareZone
8-2015 - 10-2017
GM, Pharmacy
CareZone
In the press

Media appearances

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Education
Ph.D.
UC Irvine
B.S.
The Johns Hopkins University
Social presence
in
Behavioral profile

DISC profile (public)

DISC behavioral profile

Dominance, influence, steadiness, and calculativeness scores with guidance on how this person prefers to communicate and decide.

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