Chris Poland was born on December 1, 1957, in Dunkirk, New York, on Lake Erie in the western part of the state. He has said that a cousin's band playing Rolling Stones covers got him started, and his first group, Pegasus, won a local Battle of the Bands without ever making a record. He then replaced Dick Maxfield as the guitarist in a band called Welkin, where he first met odd time signatures. A school accident in which his hand went through a glass door panel left him unable to bend his index finger or feel his little finger, and he is often described as playing differently because of it. His early listening was Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Mountain and Led Zeppelin, followed by Jeff Beck's instrumental records and fusion groups such as Weather Report and Return to Forever.

He moved to California and formed The New Yorkers with drummer Gar Samuelson, Stu Samuelson and the bassist Robertino Pagliari, a fusion-leaning band that was compared to the Mahavishnu Orchestra and never recorded. Through Samuelson he met Dave Mustaine, and in 1984 he joined Megadeth, playing guitar on Killing Is My Business... and Business Is Good! (1985) and Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? (1986). He and Samuelson were dismissed in 1987 amid drug problems. Mustaine has since called him a guitarist who can outplay him, and that Megadeth lineup remains the reason most listeners know his name.

The years after Megadeth were split between metal and instrumental work. His solo debut Return to Metalopolis (1990), made with his brother Mark Poland on drums, was an instrumental heavy metal guitar album issued through Roadrunner and Enigma. He briefly played bass with the Circle Jerks in 1989, recorded solos on demos for what became Megadeth's Rust in Peace in 1990 without rejoining the band, and formed the progressive metal band Damn the Machine, which signed to A&M and released one album in 1993 before the label dropped it. After singer Dave Clemmons left, the remaining members reformed as Mumbo's Brain, and Chasing the Sun and Rare Trax followed on Grooveyard Records in 2000. He contributed guest guitar to two Lamb of God albums in 2003 and 2004, and in 2004 he played lead guitar on most of Megadeth's The System Has Failed, working with drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, without rejoining the band. A dispute over the use of his Rust in Peace demos on that year's remaster was settled.

The jazz-fusion side of his work is the trio OHM, founded with Pagliari. Poland has said the idea was simply to play the kind of music the two of them liked. It is an instrumental trio with no singer that often plays the Baked Potato, the Studio City jazz club. Its first album, Ohm: (Lion Music, 2003), was followed by Amino Acid Flashback (2005) and Circus of Sound (2008), the last issued on Tone Center, a label known for fusion guitar records, with Kofi Baker, son of Cream's Ginger Baker, among the drummers. Tsunami Jams (2012) consists of spontaneous improvisations. In 2009 and 2012 Poland and Pagliari recorded as OHMphrey with Jake Cinninger, Joel Cummins and Kris Myers of the jam band Umphrey's McGee, and in 2012 he made Polcat with the saxophonist Frank Catalano, bassist Sean O'Bryan Smith and drummer Jim Gifford. Catalano then brought him in as a guest on Love Supreme Collective (Ropeadope, 2014), a four-track tribute EP to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme that also featured drummer Jimmy Chamberlin and bassist Percy Jones.

Megadeth's former drummer Nick Menza joined OHM in 2015. On May 21, 2016, three songs into a set at the Baked Potato, Menza collapsed on stage and was pronounced dead at a hospital; he was 51. Poland's album Resistance (Ropeadope, March 13, 2020), a fusion record that includes a version of Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage", has a track titled "Flame Runner" that is dedicated to Menza. Poland was inducted into the Metal Hall of Fame in January 2020, and a 30th anniversary edition of Return to Metalopolis came out on Combat Records the same year. In 2026 he was the constant presence on Black Flame (Cleopatra Records, April 24, 2026), a heavy metal collaboration credited to Nuclear Messiah with dozens of guest musicians.

Poland is a rock and metal guitarist with a documented second career in jazz fusion, and both sides are part of his story. English Wikipedia describes him first as the former Megadeth guitarist and lists his genres as thrash metal, instrumental rock, jazz rock, progressive metal and heavy metal, while AllMusic tags him under both Pop/Rock and Jazz and lists the styles Neo-Prog, Prog-Rock, Progressive Metal, Fusion, Hard Rock and Heavy Metal. The jazz side is best heard in OHM, a power trio that mixes distorted rock guitar with odd meters, extended improvisation and a fretless bass, and in the releases made through jazz-leaning labels and rooms: Tone Center, Ropeadope and the Baked Potato. In 2009 Tone Center included him in its This Is Fusion Guitar compilation next to Mike Stern, Larry Coryell and Scott Henderson, among others. He names Jeff Beck, Weather Report, Return to Forever and the Mahavishnu Orchestra as models, and his hand injury is regularly cited as the source of his distinctive phrasing. His jazz repertoire on record is small, a Coltrane tribute guest spot and one Hancock standard among mostly original material, so the connection is one of idiom, band format and collaborators rather than of a long career in standards.