Director Engineering

About the role

Chime is looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our AI & App Experience (AAX) organization — the team building the next generation of the Chime member experience. AAX owns Jade, Chime’s AI-powered financial assistant, our AI platform infrastructure as well as the core app experiences and shared design system. 

In this role, you’ll own the multi-quarter strategy for AAX engineering, translating company priorities into scalable plans across these teams. You’ll build and lead a bench of TLM (tech leader managers) and senior technical staff, set the technical bar for how Chime builds AI-native, member-facing products, and partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and our Risk team to shape where AAX invests next. 

This is a role for a leader who is equally comfortable setting long-range technical vision and staying close enough to the details to guide hard architectural calls — someone who has helped build or scale AI/LLM-powered consumer products and knows how to grow the engineering leaders around them.

The base salary offered for this role and level of experience will begin at $269,000.00 and up to $373,000.00. Full-time employees are also eligible for a bonus, competitive equity package, and benefits. The actual base salary offered may be higher, depending on your location, skills, qualifications, and experience. 

In this role, you can expect to

• In partnership with our product team you will own the multi-quarter strategy for AAX engineering, translating company and product priorities into our roadmap plans across consumer facing AI experiences, AI Platform, App Journey, and Design Systems.
• Build, lead, and hire a high-caliber leadership bench of highly technical leaders/IC’s as well as building a team culture that exemplifies a builder mindset.
• Partners with your team to set technical direction for the org, driving architectural alignment across our consumer facing AI experiences, AI Platform, App Journey, and Design System.  
• You will continue to drive our AI-native engineering culture: setting the bar for how LLM-powered features get shipped safely at scale.
• Own engineering’s strategic role in product direction, partnering with Product, Design, Data Science, and Risk leadership to shape roadmaps, challenge assumptions, and integrate platform and member value into long-range plans
• Represent AAX and engineering more broadly in cross-functional and executive forums, connecting the org’s work to company-wide strategy and outcomes
• Cultivate a  high-performing culture across the org, modeling Chime’s values and ensuring strong talent, performance, and career development practices on every team
• Ensure the org maintains strong operational practices — on-call, monitoring, and incident response — for every service/experience the team owns
• Contribute to overall engineering initiatives as a member of Chime’s engineering leadership team

To thrive in this role, you have

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing managers or leading multi-team engineering organizations
• A track record of building and scaling AI/LLM-powered consumer products, with the technical depth to guide future investments and technical direction.
• Experience hiring, developing, and retaining engineering leaders (TLM’s and Staff+ ICs), and building leadership pipelines and succession plans
• Strong technical fundamentals across relevant parts of the stack (e.g., React Native, Python or Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, distributed systems) and the judgment to know where to go deep
• Demonstrated ability to translate company and product strategy into multi-quarter engineering plans, and to adapt org design as priorities and scale evolve
• Excellent executive communication skills — you can craft a compelling narrative that connects org strategy to business outcomes for senior leaders and cross-functional partners
• Experience partnering closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and Risk/Compliance functions in a regulated or high-trust environment (fintech experience a strong plus)
• AI-native fluency and a genuine interest in AI-native ways of working, with a track record of fostering that practice across teams rather than treating it as someone else’s job
• The desire to make a huge difference at a growing company, and the ability to motivate teams through delivery on aggressive schedules and goals

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