Senior Backend Engineer (Chicago)

About the role

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.

In this role, you can expect to

• 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

To thrive in this role, you have

• 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

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 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 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

• 🏢 A thoughtful hybrid work policy that combines in-office days and trips to team and company-wide events depending on location to ensure you stay connected to your work and teammates, whether you’re local to one of our offices or remote


• 💻 Hybrid work perks like backup child, elder and/or pet care, as well as a subsidized commuter benefit


• 💰 Competitive salary based on experience


• ✨ 401k match plus great medical, dental, vision, life, and disability benefits


• 🏝 Generous vacation policy and company-wide Chime Days, bonus 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 24 weeks of paid parental leave for birthing parents and 12 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birthing parents


• 👪 Access to Maven, a family planning tool, with $15k lifetime reimbursement for egg freezing, fertility treatments, adoption, and more.


• 🎉 In-person and virtual events to connect with your fellow Chimers—think cooking classes, guided meditations, music festivals, mixology classes, paint nights, etc., and delicious snack boxes, too!


• 💚 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.

We hire candidates of any race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital or family status, disability, Veteran status, and any other status. Chime is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Cook County Ordinance, and consistent with Canadian provincial and federal laws. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

To learn more about how Chime collects and uses your personal information during the application process, please see the Chime Applicant Privacy Notice.