Staff Software Engineer, AI & App Experience

About the role

Chime is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to shape the technical foundation of Jade, an AI-powered financial assistant serving millions of members. You will architect agent systems, build evaluation frameworks, and establish guardrails that allow the team to ship AI features safely at scale. This is a hands-on role where you will prototype quickly, write production code, and raise engineering standards across the team while owning capabilities from initial problem framing through measurement and iteration.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define the technical direction for LLM-based development on Jade, including agent architectures, prompt strategies, and orchestration patterns
• Design and ship new member-facing AI capabilities, moving between product discovery and hands-on engineering
• Build evaluation frameworks, observability systems, and guardrails that enable fast and safe releases of LLM-powered features
• Develop and strengthen backend services and internal tooling such as model routing, prompt management, agent orchestration, and evaluation pipelines
• Use AI-assisted coding and rapid prototyping in your daily workflow, converting one-off AI workflows into reusable systems that multiply team output
• Establish quality gates for AI-assisted code, encode common failure modes into shared evals and guardrails, and push the team toward new possibilities with AI tooling
• Apply judgment about when AI-generated output needs human review, calibrating model autonomy based on risk and reversibility
• Run A/B tests, analyze results, and make data-driven decisions about what to scale, change, or discontinue
• Collaborate with product, design, data science, and risk teams to understand member needs and deliver secure, scalable solutions
• Uphold high standards through code reviews and mentorship, amplifying the impact of other engineers
• Participate in on-call rotation, including responding to incidents outside regular hours when needed

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend or full-stack software development in production environments
• Deep knowledge of system design, distributed systems, and architectural patterns for high-scale applications
• Proficiency in Python or similar frameworks, with the ability to make sound decisions across the stack
• Daily, active use of LLMs, AI code assistants, and generative AI tooling as part of your workflow
• Hands-on experience building or shipping LLM-powered product features at production scale, such as agents, conversation experiences, evals, prompt strategies, or guardrails
• Demonstrated ability to turn AI into lasting productivity gains by reusing workflows, encoding recurring fixes into evals and tooling, and critically reviewing AI-generated output
• Strong judgment about where and how to apply AI, adjusting verification effort and model autonomy based on stakes and reversibility
• Experience with transactional databases like Postgres and caching systems like Redis
• Focus on writing maintainable, well-tested code
• Track record of technical leadership across teams, setting direction and driving architectural decisions without relying on positional authority
• History of mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar
• Product mindset with a bias toward action: ship v1 fast, learn from real usage, and iterate based on data

Nice to have

• Experience with agent development
• Background in fintech
• Startup experience

Skills & tools

• Python
• LLMs and generative AI tooling
• Agent architectures and orchestration
• Prompt engineering and management
• Evaluation frameworks and guardrails
• Postgres
• Redis
• Distributed systems

Practical notes

• In-office four days per week with Fridays remote for those near an office
• Backup child, elder, and pet care available
• Subsidized commuter benefits for eligible employees
• Comprehensive health, financial, and wellbeing benefits
• Generous vacation policy and company-wide paid days off
• 1% of time off for community volunteering
• Annual wellness stipend
• Up to 22 weeks paid parental leave for birthing parents, 12 weeks for non-birthing parents
• Family planning reimbursement
• Equal opportunity employer; considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Cook County Ordinance, NYC Fair Chance Act, and LA City requirements