Tech Lead Manager, Platform
Chime · San Francisco, United States · 14h ago
About the role
We're looking for a Technical Lead Manager (TLM) to lead our CI/CD team, the group that owns how every Chime engineer builds, integrates, and safely ships code. Your team owns the integration and delivery surface: source and code intelligence (GitHub, Sourcegraph), continuous integration and build (CircleCI, Qlty), artifacts (Artifactory), and the release-safety layer that gets changes to production without breaking it. Your team's mission is continuous, safe, reliable, and efficient integration and delivery of features. Every merge and every deployment at Chime runs through what your team builds.
This is a player-coach role. Under Chime's Builder Operating Model, the TLM is a single accountable owner at the team level. You own both delivery and people for a small team, and you stay hands-on in the codebase. You'll spend about 40%+ of your time building, authoring PRs that land in production, with the remainder split across people management, planning, and other business processes. You'll lead a team of 4 engineers, own the roadmap for a high-leverage platform surface, and be directly accountable for the reliability of the pipelines and release systems in the critical path of every Chime team. You're expected to use AI coding agents and workflows to keep planning, operations, and delivery overhead low so you can stay in the code and operate the team.
In this role, you can expect to
- Build and ship, hands-on. Author and review PRs that land in production. Own the team's technical direction, architecture, and quality bar; partner with senior ICs and lead technical design discussions and technical planning.
- Lead and grow the team. Own full people management for the team: 1:1s, career coaching, performance feedback, promotion decisions, and hiring. Build an inclusive, high-trust team and own its health and engagement. Mentor engineers toward Staff or a future TLM path.
- Own the CI/CD platform. Set direction and delivery for the build and integration systems (GitHub, CircleCI, Artifactory, Sourcegraph, Qlty etc): fast, reliable, self-service pipelines with strong documentation and low-friction adoption so every product team ships faster with less support burden.
- Be accountable for safe delivery at scale. Own the release-safety toolkit (Release Guard, canaries and progressive delivery, feature flagging with Tuner, and rollback) and the operational discipline behind it: incident prevention, incident response, SLAs, and blameless learning for systems in the critical path of every deploy.
- Balance the platform-team tension. Weigh new capabilities against keep-the-lights-on work, security remediation, and dependency upgrades, and make those trade-offs legible to engineers, cross-functional partners, and leadership.
- Champion AI-driven velocity. Use AI coding agents and tooling to scale yourself and your team across planning, coding, and ops/triage, and introduce workflows that measurably improve team velocity.
- Own cross-functional coordination. Serve as the XFN point of contact for your platform's capabilities. Coordinate inbound requests and outbound dependencies, partner with client engineering teams and sibling platform teams (Release Enablement, Developer Foundations) on scope and delivery commitments, and tie-break technical decisions.
- Partner across the Platform Org. Work closely with product engineering teams, security, Core Infrastructure, and other Engineering Services leaders on shared roadmaps, dependencies, and other initiatives.
To thrive in this role, you have
- 5+ years of software engineering experience and 2+ years leading or managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development, with the appetite and ability to stay hands-on in the codebase.
- A track record of delivering CI/CD, build/release, or developer-productivity systems: continuous integration, build pipelines, artifact management, or progressive delivery.
- Hands-on experience with CI systems (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or comparable), build pipelines, and artifact management in production (must-have).
- Hands-on technical depth you can still exercise: you author and review production PRs and can lead technical design, not just delegate it. Strong development experience in Ruby, Go, Python, or comparable languages.
- Experience with progressive and safe delivery: canaries, release gating, feature flagging, and rollback strategies.
- Strong understanding of operating production systems at scale: reliability, observability, incident response, and the operational discipline platform ownership demands.
- The judgment to balance delivery velocity against safety, reliability, and technical-debt realities, and the communication skills to make those trade-offs clear to engineers and executives alike.
- Demonstrated use of AI coding agents and tooling to accelerate development and team velocity, with a concrete example of the impact on your team's output.
- A customer-obsessed mindset toward internal developers. You measure success by the productivity and reliability experienced by the engineers who build on your platform.
- Excellent written and verbal communication and a collaborative, low-ego approach to cross-team leadership.
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Argo CD, or GitOps-based deployment in production.
Nice to haves
- Experience with code intelligence and quality tooling (Sourcegraph, Artifactory, code-quality and linting systems).
- Familiarity with common monitoring, logging, and observability platforms (e.g., Datadog).
- Experience in financial services or other high-reliability, regulated environments.
#LI-Onsite #LI-WW1
Below is the base salary offered for this role and level of experience. Full-time employees may also be eligible for bonus(es), competitive equity, and benefits. For commissioned roles, the base salary listed in this job description does not include incentive/variable pay. The actual base salary offered may be higher, depending on your location, skills, qualifications, and experience.
A little 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. Through our user-friendly tools and intuitive platforms, we empower our members to take control of their finances and work towards their goals. Whether it's starting a savings account, purchasing a first car or home, launching a business, or pursuing higher education, we're proud to have helped millions unlock their financial potential.
We're a team of problem solvers, dreamers, and builders with one shared obsession: our members. From day one, Chimers have worked tirelessly to out-hustle and out-execute competitors to bring our mission to life. Their grit and determination inspire us to work harder every day to deliver the very best experience possible. We each bring an owner's mindset to our work, refusing to be outdone and holding ourselves accountable to meet and exceed the highest bars for our teams, our company, and our members.
We believe in being bold, dreaming big, and taking risks, while also working together, embracing our diverse perspectives, and giving each other honest feedback. Our culture remains deeply entrepreneurial, encouraging every Chimer to see themselves as stewards of our mission to help everyday Americans unlock their financial progress.
We know that to achieve our mission, we must earn and keep people's trust—so we hold ourselves to the highest standards of integrity in everything we do. These aren't just words on a wall—our values are embedded in every aspect of our business, serving as a north star that guides us as we work to help millions achieve their financial potential.
Because if we don't—who will?
*Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by The Bancorp Bank, N.A. or Stride Bank, N.A., Members FDIC.
What we offer for our full-time, regular employees
- 🏢 Our in-office work policy is designed to keep you connected - 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. Whether you’re coming in regularly or are part of our fully remote program, you’ll stay engaged with your work and teammates.
- 💻 Benefits that support your work and life, including backup child, elder, and pet care and subsidized commuter benefits for eligible employees.
- ✨ Comprehensive health, financial, and wellbeing benefits designed to support you at every stage of life.
- 🏝 Generous vacation policy and company-wide paid days off
- 🫂 1% of your time off to support local community organizations of your choice
- 👟 Annual wellness stipend to use towards eligible wellness related expenses
- 👶 Up to 22 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birthing parents
- 👪 Access to family planning reimbursement
- 💚 A challenging and fulfilling opportunity to join one of the most experienced teams in FinTech and help millions unlock financial progress
We know that great work can’t be done without a diverse team and inclusive environment. That’s why we specifically look for individuals of varying strengths, skills, backgrounds, and ideas to join our team. We believe this gives us a competitive advantage to better serve our members and helps us all grow as Chimers and individuals.
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 under provincial, federal, state, and local laws, regulations, or ordinances. We will also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Cook County Ordinance, NYC Fair Chance Act, and the LA City Fair Chance Ordinance, and consistent with Canadian provincial and federal laws. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation during any stage of the application process, please contact: accommodations@chime.com.
To learn more about how Chime collects and uses your personal information during the application process, please see the Chime Applicant Privacy Notice.