Chien served as vice president of research at Intel Corporation from 2005 to 2010, leading long-range and exploratory research globally. He also has extensive faculty experience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and at the University of California-San Diego, where he created the Center for Networked Systems and served as its founding director. He also founded Entropia Inc., an early grid computing company, and served as its chief technology officer and chaired its board of directors. Chien is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.