Tech Lead Manager, Platform

About the role

We're looking for a Technical Lead Manager (TLM) to lead our CI/CD team, the group that owns how every Chime engineer builds, integrates, and safely ships code. Your team owns the integration and delivery surface: source and code intelligence (GitHub, Sourcegraph), continuous integration and build (CircleCI, Qlty), artifacts (Artifactory), and the release-safety layer that gets changes to production without breaking it.

This is a player-coach role under Chime's Builder Operating Model. You own both delivery and people for a small team of 4 engineers, staying hands-on in the codebase (spending about 40%+ of your time building and authoring PRs) with the remainder split across people management, planning, and operations.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship, hands-on: Author and review PRs that land in production. Own the team's technical direction, architecture, and quality bar; lead technical design discussions and planning.
• Lead and grow the team: Own full people management for the team: 1:1s, career coaching, performance feedback, promotion decisions, and hiring.
• Own the CI/CD platform: Set direction and delivery for build and integration systems (GitHub, CircleCI, Artifactory, Sourcegraph, Qlty, etc.).
• Accountable for safe delivery at scale: Own the release-safety toolkit (Release Guard, canaries, progressive delivery, feature flagging, and rollback) and operational discipline (incident prevention, incident response, SLAs).
• Balance platform-team tension: Weigh new capabilities against maintenance, security remediation, and dependency upgrades.
• Champion AI-driven velocity: Use AI coding agents and tooling across planning, coding, and ops/triage to measurably improve team velocity.
• Cross-functional coordination: Serve as the point of contact for platform capabilities, coordinating dependencies across engineering services and product teams.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience and 2+ years leading or managing engineers (including hiring, performance management, and career development).
• Track record of delivering CI/CD, build/release, or developer-productivity systems.
• Hands-on experience with CI systems (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or comparable), build pipelines, and artifact management in production.
• Active technical depth with development experience in Ruby, Go, Python, or comparable languages.
• Experience with progressive and safe delivery (canaries, release gating, feature flagging, rollback strategies).
• Strong understanding of operating production systems at scale (reliability, observability, incident response).
• Demonstrated use of AI coding agents and tooling to accelerate development.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Argo CD, or GitOps-based deployment in production.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with code intelligence and quality tooling (Sourcegraph, Artifactory, code-quality and linting systems).
• Familiarity with common monitoring, logging, and observability platforms (e.g., Datadog).
• Experience in financial services or other high-reliability, regulated environments.