Tech Lead Manager, AI & App Experience

Chime Financial, Inc•San Francisco, CA

8d•$199,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Responsibilities

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