Staff Software Engineer - Core Banking

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.

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About the Role

At Nubank, we are on a mission to fight complexity and empower millions of people across Latin America with simple, accessible financial services. As our global footprint expands, having a resilient, high-throughput payments engine is vital to ensuring that every transaction across our markets executes seamlessly and securely.

Joining the Payments Business Area within Core Banking, you will operate as a principal technical anchor across our global transaction ecosystem. You will partner with cross-functional engineering teams, product leaders, and domain architects to design and evolve a unified, multi-region payment platform capable of scaling across borders while meeting strict local regulatory requirements.

In this role, you will drive the foundational platform strategy that powers our next phase of hyper-growth, architecting systems designed to handle over 4 billion monthly transactions. You will lead high-impact architectural decisions, mentor senior engineers, and build the low-level, high-availability foundations that serve as the backbone for Nubank's financial operations worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Platform Architecture: Architect and evolve the foundational payments platform serving Nubank's operations across Latin America, defining the target state and the path to reach it without disrupting money movement.

• Protocol and Contract Design. Own the design of payment protocols, event models and public contracts consumed by dozens of internal teams, balancing generality against the cost of breaking changes and schema evolution at high fan-out.

• Self-Service and Developer Experience. Drive the capabilities that remove our team from the critical path, including self-service diagnostics, integration tooling and documentation, treating internal engineering teams as customers of the platform.

• Legacy Consolidation and Migration. Lead the strategy to converge fragmented integration paths into a single platform surface, including deprecation plans, migration sequencing and the influence work required to move consumer teams that have their own roadmaps.

• Country Launch Readiness. Build the primitives that make launching a new country a configuration exercise rather than a re-architecture, covering local rails, payment instruments, regulatory variation and settlement models.

• Regulatory Foundations. Embed regulatory and security requirements from BACEN, Banxico and SFC, along with auditability and compliance controls, directly into platform architecture rather than as downstream adaptations.

• Scale & Performance: Design and optimize core transaction systems to process over 4 billion monthly operations with low latency and high availability. Own the platform guardrails, exactly-once semantics, reconciliation and settlement integrity. Define the SLOs, observability and operational posture behind them.

• Cross-Domain Alignment: Drive technical strategy, integration standards, and architecture across the Nubank and cross-functional partner squads.

• Technical Vision: Lead long-term architectural direction, proactively evaluating system bottlenecks and introducing scalable platform patterns.

• Technical Leadership: Set technical direction and provide mentorship to senior engineers, fostering engineering excellence and systemic resilience across teams.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience architecting and operating high-throughput, low-latency foundational backend systems in hyper-scale engineering environments.

• Track record of leading technical strategy and driving architectural alignment across multiple cross-functional engineering domains.

• Proven experience building internal platforms consumed by many engineering teams, including API and event contract design, versioning and deprecation strategy.

• Deep understanding of payments fundamentals, including ledgers, settlement, reconciliation, idempotency and consistency guarantees in distributed money movement.

• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures at scale, including topic design, schema evolution and backwards compatibility across large consumer ecosystems.

• Proven background in financial technology, payments processing, or software systems with strict regulatory and compliance requirements.

• Demonstrated ability to build technical consensus and drive adoption across teams you do not manage.

• Professional English proficiency for daily cross-border technical collaboration across international hubs.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing multi-region or internationalized platform architectures, including regulatory variation across jurisdictions.

• Platform product thinking, including measuring success by adoption, time to integrate and support load rather than shipped features.

• Prior experience in high-growth tech platforms or hyper-scale environments handling extreme transaction concurrency.

• Familiarity with financial regulatory frameworks and local payment rails in Latin America, including Pix and SPB in Brazil, SPEI and CLABE in Mexico, and equivalent schemes in Colombia.

• Exposure to AI-powered developer tooling that enables consumer teams to self-serve.

Location & Work Model

This role is based in Palo Alto, USA; São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro or Campinas, Brazil; or Toronto, Canada. This is a Hybrid role, 2 times per week model at our local Nubank offices.

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