Engineering Director

Ready to accelerate your career?

Clara is the fastest-growing company in Latin America. We've built the leading solution for companies to make and manage all their payments. We already help over 20,000 large and growing businesses operate with agility and financial clarity through locally issued corporate cards, bill pay, financing, and a powerful B2B platform built for scale.

Clara is backed by some of the most successful investors in the world, including top regional VCs like monashees, Kaszek, and Canary, and leading global funds like Notable Capital, Coatue, DST Global Partners, ICONIQ Growth, General Catalyst, Citi Ventures, SV Angel, Citius, Endeavor Catalyst, and Goldman Sachs - in addition to dozens of angel investors and local family offices. 

We’re building the financial infrastructure that powers high-performing organizations across the region. We invite you to join us if you want to be part of a fast-paced environment that will accelerate your career and support you to do some of the best work of your life alongside a passionate and committed team distributed across the Americas.

We’re looking for an exceptional Engineering Director to help lead and scale our engineering organization as we build the next generation of financial technology that empowers and increases the competitiveness of Latin American organizations.

This is a senior leadership role for someone who combines strong technical judgment, people leadership, platform and systems-scale thinking, and business acumen. You will lead multiple engineering teams, develop engineering leaders and IC builders, shape our technical strategy, and ensure we continue to increase our execution velocity while maintaining the reliability, security, and quality expected from a regulated fintech platform.

You will also play an important role in how we leverage AI across our products and engineering organization, helping us identify opportunities to improve customer experiences, automate complex workflows, and increase engineering productivity.

We’re looking for someone who thrives in a high-growth, fast-moving environment, is comfortable navigating ambiguity, and can move naturally between strategy, technology, people, and direct execution.

What you'll do

• Recruit, lead and scale engineering teams. Lead multiple teams building a high-performance culture based on ownership, collaboration, speed, and technical excellence.
• Develop exceptional builders. Coach and grow senior engineers while strengthening our leadership pipeline and raising the talent bar across the organization.
• Shape our engineering strategy. Partner with Product and business leaders to translate company priorities into a clear technical strategy and engineering roadmap.
• Drive execution at scale. Ensure teams consistently deliver high-impact products while balancing speed, quality, reliability, and long-term technical investments.
• Raise the technical bar. Provide leadership across architecture, scalability, reliability, security, observability, and engineering practices. You won't need to be the primary individual contributor, but you should be technically deep enough to challenge assumptions and earn the trust of senior engineers.
• Build for fintech-grade reliability. Ensure our systems meet the security, availability, data integrity, and auditability expectations of a financial technology platform.
• Be at the cutting edge of AI-native. Identify and drive opportunities to leverage AI across our products and engineering workflows. Help establish strong practices around AI evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, reliability, and responsible deployment.
• Partner across the business. Work closely with Product, Design, Data, Security, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to make thoughtful decisions and translate technical trade-offs into clear business implications.
• Build for the next stage of growth. Anticipate technical and organizational bottlenecks and evolve our architecture, processes, and team structure before they become constraints.

What we’re looking for

• 10+ years of software engineering experience and systems thinking, with significant experience building and operating complex production systems.
• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience, ideally recruiting and leading multiple teams in parallel.
• Proven experience building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations in fast-growing technology companies.
• Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud architectures, APIs, microservices, data systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience designing and operating high-scale, highly available systems.
• Strong understanding of modern cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and engineering best practices translated to an AI-first approach.
• Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, coach, develop, and retain exceptional engineering talent.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, make thoughtful trade-offs, and adapt quickly as priorities evolve.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Professional fluency in English.

Our current technology ecosystem includes Java/Spring Boot, React, relational and NoSQL databases, Kafka, REST APIs, AWS, Git/GitHub, and modern CI/CD tooling. You don't need to be an expert in every technology-we care more about your ability to lead teams building complex systems and make excellent technical decisions.

AI experience

You don't need to be an ML researcher, but you should understand how modern AI can be translated into reliable products and meaningful engineering leverage.

Experience with LLMs, AI-powered products, agentic systems, AI evaluation, guardrails, or AI-assisted engineering workflows is highly valuable.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, banking, cards, expense management, or financial infrastructure.
• Experience building technology in regulated environments.
• Experience scaling engineering organizations through periods of rapid growth.
• Experience building or operating AI/ML-enabled products or platforms.
• Experience with fraud, risk, credit, decisioning, or automation systems.
• Spanish and/or Portuguese proficiency.

Why this role matters

Engineering is at the core of how we build and scale our business.

As Engineering Director, you will have the opportunity to shape not only our technology, but also how our engineering organization operates, how we develop our people, and how we use AI to build better products and move faster.

This is an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the next stage of our growth and help build the technology and engineering organization that will take us there.

Why join Clara

At Clara, you’ll have the autonomy, speed, and support to make meaningful impact - not just on your team, but on how organizations are run across Latin America.

Who we are

• We’re the leading B2B fintech for spend management in Latin America.

• Certified as one of the world's fastest-growing companies, a Great Place to Work, and a LinkedIn Top Startup.

• Passionate about making Latin America more prosperous and competitive.

• Constantly innovating to build financial infrastructure that enables each of our customers to thrive.

• Product-led, high-talent-density culture - designed for builders who raise the bar.

• Proud of our open, inclusive, and values-driven environment.

What we believe in

• #Clarity. We say things clearly, directly, and proactively.

• #Simplicity. We reduce noise to focus on what really matters.

• #Ownership. We take responsibility and never wait to be told.

• #Pride. We build products and experiences we’re proud of.

• #Always Be Changing (ABC). We grow through feedback, risk-taking, and action.

• #Inclusivity. Every voice counts. Everyone contributes to our mission.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one

• Multicultural team with daily exposure to Portuguese, Spanish, and English (our corporate language)

• Annual learning budget and internal accelerated development paths

• High-ownership environment: we move fast, learn fast, and raise the bar - together

• Smart, ambitious teammates - low ego, high impact

• Flexible vacation and hybrid work model focused on results

If you’re ready for growth, ownership, and impact - apply now and help us redefine B2B finance in Latin America.

Clara’s Hybrid Policy

Claridians in a hybrid mode split their time between working from the office, talking to or visiting customers, or working from home. This hits a balance between bringing people together for in-person collaboration and learning from each other, while supporting flexibility about how to do this in a way that makes sense for each individual and team.

We don't enforce a minimum number of days for most roles, but you're expected to spend time at the office organically, and be at the office most days during your ramp-up or when required by your leader.