Tech Lead Manager, Data Integration Platform

About the Role

As a Tech Lead Manager on Chime's Data Intelligence Platform, leading the Data Integration Platform team, you will own the group that builds and operates the platform and infrastructure for the ingress and egress of first-party and third-party data into and out of Chime's ecosystem. Your team will be responsible for building and operating reliable, scalable, and secure integration pipelines and connectors that move data between Chime's internal systems and external partners, vendors, and data providers, powering analytics, experimentation, and AI-driven product experiences across Chime.

This is a manager-first, hands-on player-coach role. Your primary responsibility is leading and developing the team—setting direction and priorities, coaching engineers, and owning delivery and operational health. You will also remain technically engaged through high-leverage problems: shaping architecture, guiding designs, reviewing critical changes, and writing production code where it unlocks the team’s progress.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and roadmap for Chime's Data Integration Platform, including ingestion pipelines, connectors, and infrastructure.
• Stay hands-on through architecture, design, code reviews, and targeted production contributions.
• Design and evolve scalable, high-performance integration architecture balancing reliability, cost, and ease of use.
• Build and operate reliable connectors and pipelines across APIs, event streams, file transfers, and change-data-capture (CDC).
• Define ingress/egress patterns, throughput/latency targets, schema evolution, and error handling / replay.
• Define clear data contracts, schemas, and SLAs between producers, integration layers, and consumers.
• Build tooling and automation for governance and compliance (e.g., RBAC, PII protection, tokenization, lineage, auditability).
• Manage and grow a team of engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and setting performance expectations.
• Establish operational practices, including on-call, incident management, postmortems, and SLOs.
• Stay ahead of industry trends in data integration, streaming, and ingestion/egress tooling.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in high-scale, high-reliability software development, with a focus on platforms, infrastructure, and data integration or movement systems.
• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams, including hiring, performance management, and developing engineers.
• Hands-on coding ability in Python (preferred) or a comparable language (e.g., Java, Scala), and fluency in SQL and performance tuning.
• Track record of scaling products, platforms, and operations to support rapid data growth.
• Deep experience with ingestion/CDC pipelines, connector frameworks, event streaming, and API/file-based data exchange alongside lakehouses (e.g., Iceberg) and warehouses (e.g., Snowflake).
• Proven expertise in system and data architecture, schema design, data contracts, and schema-evolution strategies.
• Experience with modern data technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Spark, Airflow, Kubernetes, and connector/ingestion tooling (e.g., Debezium, Fivetran/Airbyte-style frameworks).
• Extensive experience in cloud-based data ecosystems (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Solid understanding of data governance, security, and compliance best practices (RBAC, PII handling, auditability).
• Strong stakeholder management and people leadership skills.