Senior Software Engineer, Lending

Title: Senior Software Engineer, Lending Location: New York, NY, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA

About the role

Chime’s Lending org builds the products and platforms that give members access to fair, transparent credit and liquidity when they need it most, from Earned Wage Access through MyPay, to flexible overdraft with SpotMe, to longer-term Instant Loans, and the platforms that power credit decisions, funding, repayments, and servicing behind the scenes.

We operate some of Chime’s most consequential systems. Our teams build real-time money movement and decisioning infrastructure at scale, including underwriting and eligibility, ledgering and reconciliation, capital markets workflows, repayment systems, and financial transactions that must be correct, resilient, and auditable.

As a Senior Software Engineer in Lending, you’ll work at the seam between member-facing products and the platforms that make them possible. This is a role for engineers who want to own more than a single service or feature area. You’ll lead technical initiatives that cut across products, platforms, and partner teams, helping shape how Lending evolves as a system, not just how one team ships.

You’ll design and build backend systems where correctness, reliability, speed, and operational rigor matter deeply. You’ll partner closely with Product, Design, Risk, Data Science, Analytics, Finance, and Operations to turn ambiguous opportunities into durable solutions, influence technical direction across team boundaries, and help raise the bar for how Lending engineers build together.

The base salary offered for this role and level of experience will begin at $164,000 and up to $259,000. 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. 

Why join Lending?

Work on systems that matter

The products and platforms we build directly impact millions of members and sit at the center of Chime’s mission to help everyday people unlock financial progress. The problems are complex, the stakes are real, and the work matters.

Own a bigger surface area

This role is designed for engineers who want broader scope. You won’t be limited to a narrow feature lane. You’ll work across product experiences and shared infrastructure, helping connect strategy, systems, and execution across Lending.

Build where product and platform meet

Some of the most interesting engineering work happens in the seams: where member experience depends on credit strategy, where product velocity depends on platform leverage, and where financial correctness meets business speed. This role sits in the middle of those seams and gives you meaningful influence over how they scale.

Operate in a fast-moving, high-accountability environment

Lending is a fast-paced fintech environment where we care about moving quickly and building well. We value thoughtful design, strong engineering judgment, high-quality code, and operational excellence. We also actively use AI where it can improve quality, speed, and leverage.

Grow your technical leadership

At L5, you’ll be expected to do more than deliver strong execution. You’ll lead through ambiguity, drive alignment across teams, shape architecture and engineering patterns, and improve how the org operates over time. This is a strong role for engineers who want to expand their influence and prepare for even larger technical scope.

In this role, you can expect to

• Lead end-to-end architecture and delivery of backend systems that connect member-facing lending products with shared platforms such as Credit Risk, Capital Markets, Repayments, servicing, and core financial systems
• Drive complex, cross-team initiatives from problem definition through architecture, implementation, rollout, and iteration, especially where multiple teams or domains need to move in sync
• Own technical problems with real business and member impact, and bring structure, momentum, and clarity when the path is not obvious
• Define and evolve APIs, integration patterns, and data contracts so product teams can move faster without compromising safety, correctness, or reuse
• Design for scale, resiliency, observability, and operational excellence, with strong handling of failures, retries, reconciliation, auditability, and edge cases
• Identify opportunities to turn one-off product needs into reusable platform capabilities that unlock future velocity across Lending
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Risk, Data Science, Analytics, Finance, and Operations to translate ambiguous problems into practical, high-leverage technical solutions
• Influence how product and platform teams work together by clarifying ownership, reducing integration friction, and improving the quality of technical decision-making across boundaries
• Participate in on-call and incident response, and lead efforts to turn production lessons into lasting improvements in systems, tooling, and engineering practices
• Mentor other engineers through design reviews, technical feedback, and hands-on partnership, helping raise the leadership capacity of the broader org
• Contribute to roadmap and strategy conversations by identifying where platform investments can unlock multiple product outcomes over time

To thrive in this role, you have

• 8+ years of experience building and operating production software at scale, with a strong track record of owning backend systems end-to-end
• 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 the ability to make sound tradeoffs across correctness, scalability, resiliency, speed, and long-term maintainability
• A track record of leading complex projects that span multiple teams, systems, or business workflows
• Experience working in fintech, lending, banking, payments, risk, or other high-integrity domains where correctness, traceability, and operational rigor matter deeply
• A high-ownership mindset and comfort operating in ambiguity, including the ability to create clarity, drive alignment, and move important work forward without waiting for perfect structure
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across engineering and cross-functional teams in a low-ego, effective way
• A product mindset and strong instincts for connecting technical decisions to member experience and business outcomes
• Experience mentoring engineers and helping teams raise the bar on design quality, testing, operational excellence, and engineering ownership
• Curiosity, sound judgment, and a genuine desire to understand systems deeply and improve them over time

Nice-to-have

• Experience with lending or credit systems such as underwriting, eligibility, line assignment, limits, repayments, collections, servicing, or decisioning
• Experience with financial platform domains such as capital markets workflows, reconciliations, ledgering, accounting interfaces, partner integrations, or bank integrations
• Familiarity with experimentation, analytics, and data-informed systems used to safely evolve decisioning and product strategy over time
• Experience helping product teams adopt shared platform capabilities through strong APIs, abstractions, internal tooling, or platform patterns

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