Senior Staff Software Engineer (Crypto, SV) - IC8+ - US - 2026
About Nu
Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company has been leading an industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary technology to develop innovative products and services.
Guided by its mission to fight complexity and empower people, Nu caters to customers’ complete financial journey, promoting financial access and advancement with responsible lending and transparency. The company is powered by an efficient and scalable business model that combines low cost to serve with growing returns.
Nu’s impact has been recognized in multiple awards, including Time 100 Most Influential Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Banks.
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About the Role
Nu is looking for a senior technical leader to shape the architecture and long-term technical direction of our global crypto platform. In this hands-on individual-contributor role, you will lead consequential cross-team initiatives and establish secure, reliable foundations for crypto products at global scale.
You will work at the intersection of crypto protocols, distributed systems, money movement, security, and regulated financial products. You will identify high-leverage problems, make difficult decisions amid ambiguity, and turn deep domain expertise into capabilities and standards that benefit multiple teams.
You will partner closely with product, security, risk, compliance, and engineering leadership while mentoring senior engineers and strengthening technical decision-making across Nu. Success requires exceptional judgment and the ability to build alignment without formal authority.
You'll be responsible for
Define a multi-year technical direction for Nu's crypto systems and connect it to company, product, and customer strategy.
Lead the architecture of highly consequential, ambiguous, and security-critical capabilities while remaining hands-on in key technical decisions.
Create shared platforms, reusable capabilities, and engineering mechanisms that allow multiple teams to build and operate crypto products safely at scale.
Anticipate broad scalability, reliability, security, and operational challenges and establish standards that raise the technical bar across the organization.
Translate product, business, security, risk, and regulatory constraints into coherent technical priorities and durable system designs.
Drive complex initiatives across team and organizational boundaries, building alignment and ensuring adoption, execution quality, and measurable outcomes.
Provide technical leadership through major risks and production events, turning lessons into lasting improvements to systems and operating practices.
Mentor Staff-plus engineers and engineering leaders, contribute to hiring and technical communities, and strengthen Nu's long-term engineering capabilities.
We are looking for a person who has
Required
A sustained record of operating as a senior technical leader in a complex engineering organization, with impact extending across multiple teams or domains.
Deep production expertise in crypto infrastructure and products, with strength in areas such as blockchain integrations, DeFi, custody, signing or key management, wallets and asset movement, or smart contracts.
A record of building or transforming large-scale distributed systems, technical platforms, or financial infrastructure where security, correctness, and reliability are non-negotiable.
Demonstrated ability to set long-term technical strategy and convert it into shipped systems, broad organizational adoption, and measurable operational or business improvement.
Experience leading highly complex and ambiguous initiatives that require deep technical judgment, cross-functional tradeoffs, and change across organizational boundaries.
Ability to influence executives, engineering leaders, product leaders, security, risk, compliance, and other partners without relying on formal authority.
A strong record of mentoring senior engineers and technical leaders and raising the quality of architecture and decision-making around them.
Exceptional communication skills and the ability to create clarity, alignment, and commitment in high-stakes or rapidly changing environments.
Nice to have
Experience establishing technical foundations across multiple blockchain networks or crypto product domains.
Experience in regulated banking, fintech, payments, or institutional digital assets.
Experience with security-critical infrastructure, custody platforms, key-management systems, or high-integrity transaction processing.
Experience shaping company-wide engineering standards, technical communities, or shared platform strategy.
Recognition as a technical reference in crypto, distributed systems, security, or financial infrastructure.
Location
Palo Alto, United States
Our 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
Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable
Work Model
Hybrid 2-3 times/week: Our hybrid work model brings us to the office at least twice a week, on strategic days designed to maximize team connection and collaboration. For more details, visit https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/
Explore how we build technology at Nubank:
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.