Director Engineering

About the Role

Chime is looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our AI & App Experience (AAX) organization — the team building the next generation of the Chime member experience. AAX owns Jade, Chime’s AI-powered financial assistant, our AI platform infrastructure as well as the core app experiences and shared design system.

In this role, you’ll own the multi-quarter strategy for AAX engineering, translating company priorities into scalable plans across these teams. You’ll build and lead a bench of TLM (tech leader managers) and senior technical staff, set the technical bar for how Chime builds AI-native, member-facing products, and partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and our Risk team to shape where AAX invests next.

Responsibilities

• In partnership with our product team, own the multi-quarter strategy for AAX engineering, translating company and product priorities into roadmap plans across consumer-facing AI experiences, AI Platform, App Journey, and Design Systems.
• Build, lead, and hire a high-caliber leadership bench of highly technical leaders and ICs, fostering a builder mindset culture.
• Partner with your team to set technical direction for the org, driving architectural alignment across consumer-facing AI experiences, AI Platform, App Journey, and Design System.
• Drive our AI-native engineering culture: setting the bar for how LLM-powered features get shipped safely at scale.
• Own engineering’s strategic role in product direction, partnering with Product, Design, Data Science, and Risk leadership to shape roadmaps and challenge assumptions.
• Represent AAX and engineering in cross-functional and executive forums, connecting the org’s work to company-wide strategy and outcomes.
• Cultivate a high-performing culture across the org, ensuring strong talent, performance, and career development practices.
• Ensure the org maintains strong operational practices — on-call, monitoring, and incident response — for every owned service and experience.
• Contribute to overall engineering initiatives as a member of Chime’s engineering leadership team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years managing managers or leading multi-team engineering organizations.
• A track record of building and scaling AI/LLM-powered consumer products, with the technical depth to guide future investments and technical direction.
• Experience hiring, developing, and retaining engineering leaders (TLMs and Staff+ ICs), and building leadership pipelines and succession plans.
• Strong technical fundamentals across relevant parts of the stack (e.g., React Native, Python or Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, distributed systems) and the judgment to know where to go deep.
• Demonstrated ability to translate company and product strategy into multi-quarter engineering plans, and to adapt org design as priorities and scale evolve.
• Excellent executive communication skills with the ability to connect strategy to business outcomes.
• Experience partnering closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and Risk/Compliance functions in a regulated or high-trust environment (fintech experience a strong plus).
• AI-native fluency and a genuine interest in AI-native ways of working.
• Ability to motivate teams through delivery on aggressive schedules and goals.