Senior Software Engineer (Chicago)

Overview

Chime Engineering is growing rapidly as we scale to meet the financial needs of our members. We\'re looking for driven engineers with strong leadership skills to help evolve our risk architecture, enabling deeper insights and stronger protections for our members. As a Senior Engineer, you\'ll provide technical leadership to the team, helping drive the modernization of one of our Chime Platforms within Trust & Safety. Your work will ensure a secure, seamless, and frictionless experience for our members. You\’ll lead key projects end-to-end by setting technical direction, shaping system architecture, mentoring engineers, implementing APIs, collaborating with data engineers and analysts, and ensuring the reliability and performance of the platform—while also contributing to other team initiatives as needed.

Compensation : The base salary for this role begins at $164,000 and goes up to $227,000. Full-time employees are eligible for a bonus, competitive equity package, and benefits. The actual base salary offered may be higher, depending on location, skills, qualifications, and experience.

In this role, you can expect to

• Drive technical design and architectural decisions, while mentoring engineers and fostering cross-functional collaboration
• Lead and contribute to multiple projects simultaneously, balancing ownership of key initiatives with support across broader team efforts
• Build and maintain robust, low-latency APIs and backend services that power our Trust and Safety platforms
• Become the domain expert in our platform architecture, providing technical decisions and solutions to refine our maturing platforms
• Partner with data engineers, analysts, and product managers to ship impactful features that enhance member protection and experience
• Improve platform reliability and performance through thoughtful system architecture, observability practices, and automation
• Evolve our experimentation, policy lifecycle, and ML integration capabilities to support smarter and faster decision-making at scale

To thrive in this role, you have

• 5+ years of experience developing software in a production environment at scale
• Prior experience serving as a technical lead for a team and on complex projects—driving architectural decisions, coordinating execution, and aligning cross-functional teams
• Proven experience with Ruby on Rails or comparable frameworks
• Experience with transactional databases and caching systems
• Deep understanding of architectural patterns for large-scale web applications
• Commitment to mentoring engineers and fostering team development
• An appreciation of maintainable and well-tested code
• Curiosity and passion for diving deeply into system architectures and technical challenges
• Experience in fast-paced or early-stage environments is a strong plus

About Us

At Chime, we believe that everyone can achieve financial progress. We created Chime—a financial technology company, not a bank—on the premise that core banking services should be helpful, easy, and free. We empower our members to take control of their finances and work towards their goals. We are a team of problem solvers, dreamers, and builders with one shared obsession: our members. We hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity in everything we do and strive to deliver the best experience possible. We value diversity, boldness, collaboration, and honest feedback.

What We Offer For Our Full-time, Regular Employees

• In-office policy with four days a week in the office and Fridays from home for those near one of our offices, plus team and company-wide events depending on location
• In-office perks including backup child, elder, and/or pet care, plus a subsidized commuter benefit
• Competitive salary based on experience
• ✨ 401k match plus comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits
• Generous vacation policy and company-wide Chime Days, bonus company-wide paid days off
• 1% of your time off to support local community organizations
• Annual wellness stipend for eligible wellness expenses
• Up to 24 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents
• Access to Maven with $15k lifetime reimbursement for fertility, adoption, and related services
• In-person and virtual events to connect with fellow Chimers and enjoy snacks, activities, and experiences
• A challenging and fulfilling opportunity to join one of the most experienced teams in FinTech

Chime is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital or family status, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other legally protected basis. We will also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with state and local laws. If you require accommodations during the application process, please contact: View email address on click.appcast.io. For more information on how Chime collects and uses your personal information during the application process, please see the Chime Applicant Privacy Notice.