Hammad Bashir
CTO at Chroma
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolHammad Bashir is a toolmaker and seasoned engineering leader with 11 years of experience building backend systems and developer-facing infrastructure from early startups to scale-stage companies. Currently CTO at Chroma after joining as a founding engineer, he has driven core refactors and API/server improvements for the open-source AI-native embedding database, contributing deep fixes around object construction, inheritance, and configuration. His background includes product and engineering roles at Snap, Tome, and Ubiquity6 (acquired by Discord), plus multiple founding and founding-engineer experiences that sharpen his product instincts and shipping velocity. An EECS graduate from UC Berkeley, he blends hands-on codecraft with strategic leadership, favoring pragmatic refactors that reduce tech debt and unlock rapid iteration. Notably, he repeatedly surfaces value by turning brittle internal structures into clean, maintainable abstractions that scale with growing AI workloads.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
BS EECS, BS EECS at University of California, BerkeleyY Combinator
Urdu, English
Github Skills (6)
configuration-management10
refactoring10
rust10
back-end-development10
api-design10
refactor10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
chroma-core/chroma
Jan 2023 - Mar 2023
the AI-native open-source embedding database
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 releases, 2905 reviews, 52 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Hammad's commits focused on refactoring the back-end code base, notably in the areas of the API server, internal structures and object construction. Their work included addressing a large number of issues and fixing several bugs related to object and inheritance problems within the internal classes. This included refactoring the configuration process. The user demonstrated expertise in various areas including fixing multiple issues in the API.
document-retrievalembeddingsllms
chroma-core/hnswlib
Jun 2023 - Mar 2025
Chroma's fork of hnswlib - a header-only C++/python library for fast approximate nearest neighbors
Contributions:32 reviews, 26 PRs, 47 pushes in 1 year 9 months
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