Tech Lead Manager, AI & App Experience

About the role

Chime is looking for an engineering leader to help manage and guide one of the AI & App Experience (AAX) engineering teams. Chime’s AAX org is building the next generation of the Chime member experience, including Jade, our AI-powered financial assistant. Jade helps millions of members manage their spending, stay on top of subscriptions, and reach their financial goals through conversation that's natural, reliable, and trustworthy.

TLMs at Chime manage a team of 4-5 engineers: Setting the hiring bar, coaching and developing talent, and driving all formal people management activities. They own execution and delivery for the squad. They stay in the code, authoring and shipping features alongside their team. For this team, that also means building with AI yourself and setting the bar for how LLM-powered features get shipped safely and reliably at scale.

The base salary offered for this role and level of experience will begin at $199,000.00 and up to $275,000.00. 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

Manage and develop a squad of 4-5 engineers: Hiring, 1:1s, career coaching, managing for performance

Own delivery for your squad end to end, from sprint planning and delivery commitments through service SLAs and operational health

Write and ship code alongside your team, authoring pull requests that land in production

Be accountable for the squad's technical direction, architecture, and quality bar, either via a tech lead on the squad, or by taking on the tech lead role yourself

Use AI coding agents and tooling to raise both your own leverage and your squad's, and establish the practices that make that durable for the team

Guide the design and delivery of LLM-powered capabilities, from agent experiences and evals to the guardrails and observability that keep Jade reliable at the scale of millions of members

Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and Risk on scope, prioritization, and quarterly planning, surfacing technical dependencies and capacity needs early

Act as the squad's cross-functional point of contact for its technical capabilities and dependency coordination, and carry the "what should we build" conversation if/when a PM isn't dedicated to your squad

Identify technical debt and advocate for sustainable engineering, staying an active contributor to the codebase, while ensuring quality, performance, and operational health, including a healthy on-call and incident-response culture

Build growth paths for the engineers on your squad towards the higher IC levels or a future TLM role, and contribute to broader AAX and Chime engineering initiatives as a member of the engineering leadership team

To thrive in this role, you have

2+ years in people management responsibilities

Current, hands-on coding ability and the desire to keep it. You are writing code today and want a role where that continues

A track record of using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor to accelerate real delivery, and of getting a team to adopt them with measurable impact on output

AI-native fluency: You build with LLMs and AI tooling yourself and actively foster that practice across your team rather than treating it as someone else's job

Familiarity with the challenges of shipping LLM-powered products, including agents, evals, prompt strategies, guardrails, and observability, or a strong drive to come up to speed quickly

Experience supporting and coaching members of your team around project execution, skill development, and career progression

Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with a track record of partnering closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and other cross-functional partners

A fascination with how to make teams and people thrive, an interest in pushing the technology, people, and organization envelope, and the ability to motivate a team through delivery on aggressive schedules and goals

Enjoyment in learning and diving into the deepest levels of how things work

Experience with similar tech: Python, Ruby, React Native, Distributed Systems, AWS services (data, compute), and Service Oriented Architectures

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