Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

Chime Chime · Fintech · San Francisco, CA · Data Engineering

Senior Software Engineer for Chime's Data Platform team, responsible for building and operating core infrastructure for data ingestion, transformation, quality, and governance. The role involves owning platform systems at scale, designing frameworks for other teams, and setting technical standards for data movement. Key responsibilities include designing ETL/ELT frameworks, driving the technical roadmap, partnering with various teams, architecting data governance components, and ensuring platform reliability in a regulated fintech environment.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, build, and operate self-serve ETL/ELT frameworks supporting both batch and streaming workloads, with direct ownership of pipeline reliability, data quality SLAs, and schema evolution
  2. Drive the technical roadmap for our data platform - evaluate build-vs-buy decisions, define integration patterns, and set standards that engineering teams across the company adopt
  3. Partner with Product Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and Marketing as a technical lead to design data contracts, onboard new data domains, and scale ingestion without sacrificing governance
  4. Architect and enforce data lineage, schema registry, and access controls across all domains - ensuring compliance with fintech regulatory requirements (SOX, PII handling)
  5. Own the platform - monitor, alert, debug, and resolve incidents across the data platform with the urgency expected of infrastructure that powers financial products

Skills

Required

  • Python or Java/Kotlin
  • Cloud data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift)
  • Workflow orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect)
  • IaC (Terraform)
  • Streaming technology (Kafka, Flink, or Kinesis)
  • Data modeling and transformation frameworks (dbt)
  • Observability for data systems
  • Experience operating in a regulated environment

Nice to have

  • system design skills
  • key metrics for data pipelines
  • testing, code quality, and maintainability

What the JD emphasized

  • 5+ years building, shipping, and operating data infrastructure in production
  • Experience operating in a regulated environment (fintech, healthtech, or similar) where data governance, access control, and audit trails are non-negotiable