Senior Backend Engineer

Chief is the only membership network that offers senior women leaders a vetted community, 1:1 and peer group coaching, exclusive Clubhouses, executive education from the Wharton School of Business, and more. As the largest community of multihyphenate leaders, our members represent more than 10,000 companies, including 67% of the Fortune 100. More than 44% of Chief Members hold C-Suite positions.

We exist to create more possibilities for women’s power. The Chief experience is designed to provide the community, knowledge, and support women need to lead on their own terms, whether they’re senior C-Suite or executive leaders, founders, solopreneurs, or in career transition.

Chief Members connect digitally and in-person, engaging in compelling discussions and accessing resources in ways that are most meaningful to them. We have local communities across the United States, with Clubhouse locations in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

Founded in 2019, Chief is backed by renowned investors including CapitalG, General Catalyst, Inspired Capital, and Primary Ventures. Our network brings women in leadership together to share their ideas, insight, and influence, and the power of what we’re doing is felt by every member of our team. Our workplace is built on being real and respectful. We help grow careers, maintain our team’s wellbeing, and give everyone a seat at the table. We build teams where diverse voices, identities, perspectives, and experiences are represented and celebrated. Read more about working at Chief: https://chief.com/careers.

We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer who builds with AI, both in the product and in how they work. You'll own core backend systems behind the Chief member experience and lead the server-side work that brings AI features to members.

Our member platform runs on TypeScript, Node, GraphQL, Postgres, with a React frontend. You'll shape its evolution: the APIs, data models, and integrations that let us ship LLM-powered features safely and reliably. On a small team, your judgment on design, tradeoffs, and quality will carry real weight.

• Design, build, and own backend services and GraphQL APIs for the member platform, from design through production.

• Build the backend for AI features, including our member concierge and matching: LLM integrations, retrieval and context pipelines, tool use, and evaluation.

• Put security guardrails around AI in production: human-in-the-loop review, logging, cost and latency monitoring, and handling of member data.

• Keep the platform highly available and fault tolerant, with sound observability, testing, and incident response.

• Partner with product, design, and data to scope features, make tradeoffs, and ship iteratively.

• Raise the bar on AI-assisted engineering: use and improve tools like Claude Code across the team, and share what works.

• Mentor engineers and contractors through code review, design review, and pairing.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, mostly on backend systems running in production.

• Deep expertise in Node and TypeScript, including backend building blocks like queues, background jobs, and ORMs.

• Strong data modeling and SQL skills, ideally with Postgres.

• Experience designing and running GraphQL or REST APIs at production scale.

• Hands-on experience shipping at least one LLM-powered feature to real users, using APIs such as Anthropic or OpenAI.

• A daily habit of building with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar), plus clear judgment about when to trust their output.

• A track record of keeping systems highly available: monitoring, alerting, on-call, and postmortems.

• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical partners, and comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end.

• Experience with RAG, embeddings, vector search, or recommendation and matching systems.

• Experience building agentic workflows, tool use, or MCP integrations.

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, prompt versioning, and AI observability tools.

• Experience integrating with Salesforce or other CRMs, and with data warehouses such as Redshift.

• Experience with Apollo and React.

• Prior work at a membership, community, or consumer subscription company.

• Competitive salary and equity

• Flexible vacation policy

• 20 weeks of paid gender neutral parental leave

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, 401(k)

• Opportunity to work for a startup focused on driving real change for women in business

• Opportunity to create and attend inspiring experiences and events with leaders of the industry

• Access to our ongoing virtual Chief member exclusive content, including workshops, thought leadership, and iconic speakers

While we’re committed to remaining compliant and adhering to mandates, for us, pay transparency is more than a consideration of what’s lawful and unlawful but rather, an opportunity to disclose what’s required, and what we think is a fair and equitable compensation framework.

At Chief, we want to hire, develop, and retain the best talent, making Chief a top destination to accelerate your career. Our compensation framework is a key part of our vision, and we continually revisit and invest in our philosophy and framework to ensure we remain competitive and relevant, on a quest to achieve our vision.

The pay transparency mandates, as well as our own policies and practices, are a means of narrowing the gender pay gap and fostering an engaged and positive working environment that builds trust, on our mission to change the face of leadership.

The base salary for this role is: $160,000 - $170,000/yr