Lead Software Engineer (Potential to Grow into Team Leadership)

About Bluevine

Bluevine is the largest small business banking platform in the U.S., redefining how entrepreneurs manage their money. We create modern financial solutions, from checking and lending to payments and beyond, designed to help small business owners grow, thrive, and take control of their financial future. Our best-in-class technology, advanced security, and deep understanding of the small business community give our customers the confidence to focus on what they do best.

Since 2013, we’ve supported more than 750,000 small businesses nationwide. Backed by leading investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, 83North, and Citi Ventures, our 500+ person global team shares one mission: to give small businesses the financial tools they need to succeed.

We’re innovators driven by big ideas, collaboration, and real impact. Here, you’ll have the freedom to take ownership, grow your career, and make a difference for small business owners across America. Ready to shape what’s next?

About The Role

At Bluevine, we're building the next generation of AI-powered engineering capabilities to accelerate innovation across the company. As a Lead Engineer, you'll play a key role in shaping our backend architecture, AI platform, and internal developer tooling while solving complex engineering challenges at scale.

This is a highly autonomous, hands-on technical leadership role where you'll influence architecture, drive strategic technical initiatives, and help engineering teams adopt modern AI workflows responsibly and effectively. You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams and mentor engineers through technical leadership, design reviews, and hands-on implementation.

As the organization grows, there may be opportunities to take on people management responsibilities, depending on business needs and your career aspirations. Whether you continue growing as a senior technical leader or move into engineering management, you'll have the opportunity to make a significant impact across the organization.

What You Will Do

• Lead the design and development of scalable backend services and core platform capabilities that solve complex architectural and distributed systems challenges.

• Build proprietary AI-powered internal tools and standardize backend infrastructure to improve engineering productivity across teams.

• Drive technical strategy for AI-enabled engineering solutions, establishing best practices around reliability, security, privacy, observability, and cost efficiency.

• Lead complex technical initiatives from design through production, partnering closely with Product, Data, Risk, and Infrastructure teams.

• Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and hands-on software development.

• Influence engineering standards, technical direction, and long-term platform strategy across multiple teams.

• Define engineering processes, execution plans, and technical approaches for high-impact initiatives.

• Build internal platforms, frameworks, and infrastructure that enable other Bluevine engineering teams to deliver faster and more reliably.

• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and identify practical opportunities to improve software development workflows.

What We Are Looking For

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree (or 6+ years with a Master's degree).

• Proven experience leading complex technical initiatives and mentoring engineers as a Tech Lead, Lead Engineer, or similar role.

• Strong Python development skills and deep expertise in distributed systems design.

• Extensive experience building scalable cloud-based systems, APIs, databases, and production services.

• Hands-on experience using AI development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, or Claude to improve engineering workflows.

• Strong understanding of modern LLM application architectures, including prompt management, structured outputs, tool/function calling, agentic frameworks, and semantic routing.

• Experience working with vector databases (such as Pinecone, Milvus, or pgvector), event streaming platforms (Kafka or RabbitMQ), and modern AI frameworks such as AWS Bedrock AgentCore or MCP.

• Ability to evaluate AI solutions from an engineering perspective, considering scalability, security, privacy, latency, reliability, maintainability, and cost.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills with a demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across teams.

• Self-driven, pragmatic, and comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, observability, and production operations.

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, compliance, fraud, or other regulated environments.

• Experience with Big Data technologies such as Apache Spark, Flink, AWS EMR, Databricks, Snowflake, or Apache Iceberg.

• Background in Data Science, Machine Learning Engineering, or MLOps, with familiarity in model training pipelines, evaluation metrics, feature engineering, and statistical modeling.

What Success Looks Like

• You build highly reliable, scalable backend platforms that accelerate engineering productivity and support the company's strategic goals.

• You become a trusted technical leader, driving architectural decisions and influencing engineering best practices across the organization.

• You successfully lead complex cross-functional initiatives from concept through production.

• You mentor engineers, helping raise the technical bar across the team.

• As the organization evolves, you may also have opportunities to expand your impact through people leadership, depending on business needs and your career aspirations.

• You foster collaboration, ownership, and technical excellence while embodying Bluevine's engineering values.

Benefits & Perks

• Excellent group health coverage

• Stock options

• Flexible hybrid work model

• Large Study Fund contribution

• Salary Benchmarks and Checkpoints

• Monthly meal card of TenBis or CiBus (your choice) with generous balance

• Free parking for cars, scooters, and bikes

• Free gym membership

• Company-sponsored Mental Health Benefits

• PTO, Company Holidays, and Flexible Holidays

• Community-based volunteering opportunities