Lead technical initiatives across engineering groups, shaping architecture and roadmaps while building production systems, solving complex distributed-systems challenges, and helping teams deliver reliably at scale.
Senior Staff Software Engineer
📜 Description
- Lead complex, ambiguous initiatives from technical direction through production delivery.
- Identify high-impact problems and build scalable solutions that influence business results and strategy.
- Shape long-term strategy and technical roadmaps with product and business leaders.
- Make high-stakes architecture decisions and guide teams through trade-offs.
- Set engineering standards and reusable components adopted across teams.
- Mentor senior engineers and peers, support hiring, and represent Nu in external technical discussions.
🛠️ Requirements
- Extensive Staff-level or higher experience designing, building, and operating high-scale, mission-critical systems.
- Track record of delivering initiatives across organizational boundaries with little formal authority.
- Hands-on coding experience, including validating architecture in production.
- Strong judgment in ambiguous situations and experience building new systems and evolving existing ones.
- Ability to communicate technical strategy and build alignment across engineering, product, and senior leadership.
- Pragmatic use of AI, with a focus on measuring its impact.
- Professional fluency in English.
✨ Benefits
- Opportunity of earning equity at Nu
- Medical Insurance
- Dental and Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance and AD&D
- Extended maternity and paternity leaves
- Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses
- NuLanguage - Our language learning program
- NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program
- 401K Saving Plans - Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account
- Work-from-home Allowance
Full job description
About Nu
Nu serves more than 140 million customers, guided by a mission to fight complexity and empower people. The company has been leading an industry transformation through innovative products and human-centered services.
Proprietary technology and data at scale power Nu’s digital platform, built to promote financial access, advancement, and transparency. Its business model thrives on customer love and lower costs, feeding a flywheel of growth and profitability.
Visit our Institutional Page
ABOUT THE ROLE
Nu runs a twelve-year-old platform that has never stopped growing: thousands of microservices, low-latency payment rails, large-scale data platforms, machine learning in the critical path, and one mobile app carrying a dozen financial products across several regulated markets. We are expanding into new countries, new lines of business and new interfaces, including AI agents that act on customers’ behalf. Many of the systems we need for that don’t exist yet.
We’re hiring Senior Staff Software Engineers to be the technical reference for an area of the business. You’ll find the problems worth solving, design and ship the solutions, and raise the bar for the teams around you. If Staff is about making a team succeed, Senior Staff is about making an organization succeed. You’ll be matched to a specific team based on your depth and interests. Current areas include agentic and AI-native banking, payments and money movement, fraud, identity and risk, core banking, and platform and infrastructure.
YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR
Leading complex, ambiguous, strategic initiatives end to end, from setting the technical direction through to code running in production.
Spotting the problems worth solving in your area and delivering scalable solutions that change business results and strategy, not just roadmap items.
Shaping your area’s mid- to long-term strategy with product and business leaders, then turning it into a technical roadmap others can build on.
Making high-stakes architecture decisions where no clear precedent exists, and guiding teams through the trade-offs.
Setting standards beyond your own team, including design guidelines, quality bars and reusable components that other squads adopt.
Mentoring senior engineers, managers and peers across teams. You’ll also take part in hiring and lead or sponsor guilds.
Representing Nu in technical conversations with external partners, platforms and vendors.
WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS
Required
Extensive experience at Staff level or above (or equivalent) designing, building and running high-scale, mission-critical systems.
A track record of leading initiatives across organizational boundaries with little formal authority, and of seeing them land.
Evidence that you ship. You still write code and validate architecture in production.
Strong judgment in ambiguous situations, and a history of building systems from scratch as well as evolving large ones you inherited.
The ability to explain complex technical strategy clearly to engineers, product partners and senior leadership, and to build alignment around it.
A pragmatic, hands-on approach to AI. You use it to get more done, and you measure what it actually delivers.
Professional fluency in English.
Nice to have
Experience in payments, card networks, fraud and risk, or digital banking.
Experience building consumer-facing products at scale, with real product and UX sensibility.
Experience in regulated or otherwise unforgiving environments, where correctness matters more than speed.
Experience with LLMs, agent platforms or protocols such as MCP.
Portuguese or Spanish.
Clojure or functional programming experience. It’s our primary backend language, but it isn’t required: every engineer goes through an immersive Clojure onboarding.
LOCATIONS
Palo Alto, CA, USA · Miami, FL, USA · McLean, VA, USA · Toronto, ON, Canada · São Paulo, Brazil
WORK MODEL
This is a hybrid role, requiring attendance in the office 3 days per week. For more details, visit https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/
OUR BENEFITS
United States
Opportunity of earning equity at Nu
Medical Insurance
Dental and Vision Insurance
Life Insurance and AD&D
Extended maternity and paternity leaves
Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses
NuLanguage - Our language learning program
NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program
401K Saving Plans - Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account
Work-from-home Allowance
Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable
Canada
Industry-competitive Canadian benefits provided by EOR
Brazil
Chance of earning equity at Nu
Food/ Meal Card (Vale-Refeição and/or Vale Alimentação)
Public Transportation Commuting Benefit (Vale-Transporte)
NuCare – Psychological, Financial and Legal Assistance Program
Life Insurance
Medical Plan
Dental Plan
NuLanguage – Language Course Program
Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses
Extended Parental Leave
Daycare Allowance
Parental Consultancy
Work-from-home Allowance
Gym Partnerships
30 days of paid vacation
Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable
Our recruitment process may involve the use of artificial intelligence–enabled tools, such as automated interview transcription and analysis, to support the evaluation process. Artificial intelligence is not used to make final hiring decisions; all decisions are made by human reviewers.
To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here
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