Lead Systems Engineer (Kafka)

Socket.dev; Toronto; On-site; CAD 296,400 - 355,680; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Pension Plan

Vacations

Nucleo learning platform

NuLanguage language learning

NuCare mental health program

Job summary

Nubank is seeking an experienced software engineer to evolve and operate its high-volume messaging platform and infrastructure. The role involves ownership of critical platform capabilities, reliability, and operability in a multi-account AWS environment, with emphasis on Kubernetes and distributed systems.

The Lead level invites independent problem ownership, strong collaboration, and the ability to drive engineering decisions in partnership with teams.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with production distributed systems experience.
• Solid Kubernetes, networking and AWS experience in large-scale environments.
• Experience operating infrastructure-heavy platforms with high reliability requirements.
• Ability to troubleshoot complex production issues across app, infra and network layers.
• Experience improving observability, automation and operational tooling.
• Understanding of scalability, resilience, performance and failure isolation patterns.
• Ability to work autonomously on ambiguous technical problems and drive them to execution.
• Strong collaboration skills across team boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Operate and improve large-scale messaging and platform infrastructure based on Kafka used by critical systems.
• Contribute to reliability, scalability and performance of asynchronous platforms.
• Design and implement high-throughput, low-latency, fault-tolerant solutions.
• Improve observability, automation and operational excellence across the platform.
• Support incident analysis, troubleshooting and root cause remediation in production.
• Optimize infrastructure usage and drive cost awareness in AWS environments.
• Work on platform capabilities that enable safe growth in message volume and cluster footprint.
• Partner with engineers to evolve platform standards, tooling and best practices.
• Contribute to architectural discussions on messaging, traffic patterns and service communication.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

AWS

Observability

Automation

Troubleshooting

Collaboration

Autonomy

Tools

Apache Kafka

Job description

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. 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. Visit our institutional page: https://www.nu.com/2026-en

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced software engineer to help evolve and operate Nubank’s messaging platform and the infrastructure that supports asynchronous communication at scale.

This role sits in a team responsible for highly critical platform capabilities that support a wide range of internal systems across multiple business domains and countries. The platform operates in a large and complex environment, with hundreds of clusters, thousands of brokers, hundreds of thousands of topics, and very large daily data volumes across multiple AWS accounts.

At the Lead level, we are looking for someone who can independently own important technical problems, improve reliability and operability, and drive engineering decisions in partnership with the team. Kafka experience is desirable, but not required. Strong knowledge of distributed systems infrastructure, especially Kubernetes, networking, and AWS, is essential.

What You’ll Be Responsible For

• Operate and improve large-scale messaging and platform infrastructure based on kafka used by critical systems across Nubank

• Contribute to the reliability, scalability, and performance of asynchronous communication platforms

• Help design and implement solutions for high-throughput, low-latency, and fault-tolerant systems

• Improve observability, automation, and operational excellence across the platform

• Support incident analysis, troubleshooting, and root cause remediation in production environments

• Optimize infrastructure usage and help drive efficiency and cost awareness across AWS-based environments

• Work on platform capabilities that enable safe growth in message volume, topic count, and cluster footprint

• Partner with other engineers and teams to evolve platform standards, tooling, and best practices

• Contribute to architectural discussions involving messaging, traffic patterns, service communication, and platform reliability

We Are Looking for a Person Who Has

Must-have

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience working with distributed systems in production.

• Solid experience with Kubernetes, networking, and AWS in large-scale or business-critical environments.

• Experience operating infrastructure-heavy platforms with high reliability and availability requirements.

• Ability to troubleshoot complex production issues across application, infrastructure, and network layers.

• Experience improving observability, automation, and operational tooling.

• Good understanding of scalability, resilience, performance, and failure isolation patterns.

• Ability to work autonomously on ambiguous technical problems and drive them to execution.

• Strong collaboration skills and ability to work across team boundaries.

Nice-to-have

• Experience with Apache Kafka or other messaging and streaming technologies.

• Experience with platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure-focused backend engineering.

• Familiarity with multi-account AWS environments and large-scale cloud operations.

• Experience with high-throughput event-driven architectures.

• Experience balancing reliability, performance, and cost in production systems.

Our Benefits

• Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs and benefits. Base salary range: $210.000 - $252.000

• Health Insurance

• Life Insurance

• Pension Plan

• Extended maternity and paternity leaves

• Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses

• NuLanguage - Our language learning program

• NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program

• Vacations

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.By submitting an application, I acknowledge that I have read and understand the Nubank Candidate Privacy Notice.

Nubank Candidate Privacy Notice