Senior Backend Engineer, Lending Platform & Systems

Chime; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 164,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, financial, and wellbeing benef

Vacation policy and paid time off

Parental leave

Wellness stipend

Equity and bonus

Job summary

Chime is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Lending to own end-to-end backend systems that connect member-facing lending products with shared platforms. You’ll lead cross-team initiatives, shape architecture, and drive safety, scalability, and reliability across critical fintech systems.

You will partner with Product, Design, Risk, Data Science, Analytics, Finance, and Operations to translate ambiguous problems into durable, high-leverage technical solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production software at scale.
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals, ideally with Ruby on Rails or a comparable framework, and experience building APIs and distributed systems in production.
• Experience with transactional databases, asynchronous processing, caching, and large-scale application architecture.
• Strong system design judgment and ability to trade off correctness, scalability, resiliency, speed, and maintainability.
• Track record of leading complex projects spanning multiple teams, systems, or workflows.
• Experience in fintech, lending, banking, payments, risk, or other high-integrity domains.
• High-ownership mindset and comfort operating in ambiguity.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering and cross-functional teams.
• Product mindset with instincts for connecting technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring engineers to raise design quality, testing, and operational excellence.
• Curiosity and judgment to understand systems deeply and improve them over time.
• Nice-to-have: lending or credit systems, capital markets workflows, data-informed platforms, API-driven platform adoption

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end architecture and delivery of backend systems connecting member-facing lending products with shared platforms.
• Drive cross-team initiatives from problem definition to architecture, implementation, rollout and iteration.
• Own technical problems with business impact and provide structure and momentum.
• Define and evolve APIs, integration patterns, and data contracts for faster product teams without sacrificing safety.
• Design for scale, resiliency, observability, and operational excellence with robust error handling and auditability.
• Turn one-off needs into reusable platform capabilities to boost future velocity across Lending.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Risk, Data Science, Analytics, Finance, and Operations to translate problems into practical tech solutions.
• Clarify ownership, reduce integration friction, and improve technical decision-making across boundaries.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, driving improvements from production lessons.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and hands-on partnership to raise leadership capacity.
• Contribute to roadmap and strategy by identifying platform investments with broad impact.

Skills

Backend engineering

Ruby on Rails

API design

Distributed systems

System design

Leadership

Fintech domain knowledge

Mentoring engineers

Cross-team collaboration

On-call / incident response

Ownership mindset

Technical leadership

Problem solving at scale

Job description

Chime is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Lending to own end-to-end backend systems that connect member-facing lending products with shared platforms. You’ll lead cross-team initiatives, shape architecture, and drive safety, scalability, and reliability across critical fintech systems.

You will partner with Product, Design, Risk, Data Science, Analytics, Finance, and Operations to translate ambiguous problems into durable, high-leverage technical solutions.