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. Your team's mission is continuous, safe, reliable, and efficient integration and delivery of features. Every merge and every deployment at Chime runs through what your team builds.

This is a player-coach role. Under Chime's Builder Operating Model, the TLM is a single accountable owner at the team level. You own both delivery and people for a small team, and you stay hands-on in the codebase. You'll spend about 40%+ of your time building, authoring PRs that land in production, with the remainder split across people management, planning, and other business processes. You'll lead a team of 4 engineers, own the roadmap for a high-leverage platform surface, and be directly accountable for the reliability of the pipelines and release systems in the critical path of every Chime team. You're expected to use AI coding agents and workflows to keep planning, operations, and delivery overhead low so you can stay in the code and operate the team.

In this role, you can expect to 

• Build and ship, hands-on. Author and review PRs that land in production. Own the team's technical direction, architecture, and quality bar; partner with senior ICs and lead technical design discussions and technical planning.
• Lead and grow the team. Own full people management for the team: 1:1s, career coaching, performance feedback, promotion decisions, and hiring. Build an inclusive, high-trust team and own its health and engagement. Mentor engineers toward Staff or a future TLM path.
• Own the CI/CD platform. Set direction and delivery for the build and integration systems (GitHub, CircleCI, Artifactory, Sourcegraph, Qlty etc): fast, reliable, self-service pipelines with strong documentation and low-friction adoption so every product team ships faster with less support burden.
• Be accountable for safe delivery at scale. Own the release-safety toolkit (Release Guard, canaries and progressive delivery, feature flagging with Tuner, and rollback) and the operational discipline behind it: incident prevention, incident response, SLAs, and blameless learning for systems in the critical path of every deploy.
• Balance the platform-team tension. Weigh new capabilities against keep-the-lights-on work, security remediation, and dependency upgrades, and make those trade-offs legible to engineers, cross-functional partners, and leadership.
• Champion AI-driven velocity. Use AI coding agents and tooling to scale yourself and your team across planning, coding, and ops/triage, and introduce workflows that measurably improve team velocity.
• Own cross-functional coordination. Serve as the XFN point of contact for your platform's capabilities. Coordinate inbound requests and outbound dependencies, partner with client engineering teams and sibling platform teams (Release Enablement, Developer Foundations) on scope and delivery commitments, and tie-break technical decisions.
• Partner across the Platform Org. Work closely with product engineering teams, security, Core Infrastructure, and other Engineering Services leaders on shared roadmaps, dependencies, and other initiatives.

To thrive in this role, you have 

• 5+ years of software engineering experience and 2+ years leading or managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, and career development, with the appetite and ability to stay hands-on in the codebase.
• A track record of delivering CI/CD, build/release, or developer-productivity systems: continuous integration, build pipelines, artifact management, or progressive delivery.
• Hands-on experience with CI systems (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or comparable), build pipelines, and artifact management in production (must-have).
• Hands-on technical depth you can still exercise: you author and review production PRs and can lead technical design, not just delegate it. Strong development experience in Ruby, Go, Python, or comparable languages.
• Experience with progressive and safe delivery: canaries, release gating, feature flagging, and rollback strategies.
• Strong understanding of operating production systems at scale: reliability, observability, incident response, and the operational discipline platform ownership demands.
• The judgment to balance delivery velocity against safety, reliability, and technical-debt realities, and the communication skills to make those trade-offs clear to engineers and executives alike.
• Demonstrated use of AI coding agents and tooling to accelerate development and team velocity, with a concrete example of the impact on your team's output.
• A customer-obsessed mindset toward internal developers. You measure success by the productivity and reliability experienced by the engineers who build on your platform.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and a collaborative, low-ego approach to cross-team leadership.
• 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.

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