Senior Backend Engineer; Chicago

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.

The base salary offered for this role and level of experience will begin at $157,590 and up to $220,590. 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.

• 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

• 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

At Chime, we believe that everyone can achieve financial progress. We created Chime—a financial technology company, not a bank*—on the premise that basic banking services should be helpful, transparent, 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…