# Chris Mendenhall

> Staff Software Engineer at Block

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/chrismendenhall

Staff Software Engineer with 12+ years of experience in fintech, specializing in high-scale fintech backend architecture. Led engineering for global lending platforms through a 10x growth phase ($250M → $2.4B revenue) while managing teams of up to 40 engineers. Expert in building 0→1 products, navigating complex regulatory landscapes, and driving org-wide technical initiatives across Engineering, Product, and Design.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer - Square Loans @ Block
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
Staff Engineer for Block’s Square lending servicing, architecting the systems that manage loan servicing, repayment, collections, and regulatory workflows.

- Drove 10x revenue growth—from $250M to $2.4B annually—as lead engineer for the lending org, leading a team of 40 engineers building and maintaining 6 lending products across 5 countries.
- Led cross-functional teams of 15–20 engineers, product managers, data scientists, designers, and risk analysts to launch four lending products and four international rollouts.
- Engineered AI-driven incident analysis that automated remediation ticket creation, reducing on-call workload by ~40% YoY.
- Developed an AI-assisted workflow to detect stale feature flags (6+ months) and automatically raise PRs for their removal, reducing the total flag count by 40%.
- Shipped configuration framework that decoupled business logic from product-specific settings, accelerating development timelines by 80%.
- Owned and maintained 100+ gRPC endpoints powering lending functionality, handling over 20M daily requests.
- Led mentoring program pairing tenured staff and senior engineers with engineers leading their first projects.
- Reduced customer loan webpage error rates by 40% by preventing non-critical data failures from blocking page load.

### Senior Software Engineer - Square Loans @ Block
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
- Lead engineer for lending servicing, leading a team of 13 engineers supporting a portfolio of 1M loans totaling $12B.
- Architected a high-throughput orchestration platform for collection workflows handling 80k daily loans; successfully migrated 100k+ loans from legacy infrastructure using shadow traffic and staged rollouts.
- Optimized borrower payment aggregation for 10M daily transactions, leveraging parallelization and improved caching to reduce database load and enhance system efficiency.
- Launched self-service payment plans that improved customer repayment flexibility while reducing median days past due on delinquent loans from 115 to 80 days.
- Spearheaded critical security and compliance initiatives, including E2E encryption for 1M+ PII records and the stabilization of FinCEN regulatory screening pipelines processing 700k screens bi-weekly. 
- Architected automated forgiveness processing for 100k PPP loans generating $300M in revenue, replacing manual workflows with a system capable of adapting to evolving SBA regulations. 
- Reduced p95 database load by 80% by identifying and optimizing inefficient queries using Datadog performance monitoring, improving system reliability and stability.

### Senior Software Engineer (AVP) @ Bank of America
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | New York, New York
- Led a cross-functional team of 10 to architect and deploy automated reconciliation solutions processing 800M+ daily rows across 22 systems, reducing processing time by 75% (16 hours to 4 hours) and slashing false-positive discrepancies by 94%
- Built ML model (Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow) achieving ~98% accuracy in column classification, reducing manual data mapping effort by 95% and accelerating onboarding of new datasets by 60%.
- Developed self-service reconciliation UI (React) adopted by 120+ users, reducing dependency on engineering and cutting reconciliation setup time from 21 days to 3 days.
- Introduced config-driven data sourcing with reusable extractors, reducing data onboarding time from days to minutes (>95% reduction) and enabling 6× faster integration of new sources.
- Built automated SDLC release validation tooling, saving ~25 hours per weekly release and reducing release-related errors by 80%.
- Organized monthly engineering forums and events with 150+ attendees, improving cross-team knowledge sharing and collaboration across the org.

### Software Developer @ Credit Suisse
Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Greater New York City Area
- Automate severity of user reported spam emails using C#, reducing email investigation team work from 1,000 emails per day to 100 emails per day.
 - Created WPF web application that allowed users to upload video content and store it for future playback purposes (C#, Microsoft SQL Server).
 - Constructed scorecards evaluating the current state of each service for monthly review by upper management, to make sound business decisions on future investment projects.
 - Created efficient SQL queries and analyzed data to improve many applications’ reliability and performance.
 - Utilized multiple data tools, such as Tableau and Excel, to create data analysis reports to help determine which technology projections should get funding.

### Technical Analyst (Software Developer) @ Credit Suisse
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina Area
- Created, enhanced, and maintained a software provisioning tool using C# middle-tier and WPF front-end.
 - Implemented efficient data retrieval using multi-threading to make multiple API calls.
 - Developed and managed Microsoft SQL Server back-end solution. 

Skills used:
‌• C#
‌• WPF (Silverlight)
‌• PL/SQL (Oracle)
‌• Java
‌• EMC Orchestator

### Summer Analyst @ Credit Suisse
Jan 2013 – Jan 2013
Software developer for internal financial analyst application.
 
Skills learned: 
• C#
• JavaScript
• PL/SQL (Oracle)
• Debugging with Fiddler


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Mathematics and Computer Science
University of North Carolina Wilmington


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chris-mendenhall

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Source: https://flows.cv/chrismendenhall
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/chrismendenhall/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12