Staff Engineer (Java)

dlocal; Madrid; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

dLocal is seeking a Staff Engineer in Madrid to strengthen our payment platform. You will design and evolve systems for payment routing, fraud prevention, and anomaly detection, driving performance, reliability, and scale.

You will partner with product and technology leaders to deliver robust Java-based solutions, lead architecture decisions, and mentor engineers while ensuring code quality and best practices across the team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in software engineering or computer science.
• 7+ years of professional Java development experience.
• Strong grasp of OO design and design patterns.
• Experience with cloud platforms and monitoring tools.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-quality Java applications.
• Lead technical architecture and scalable Java-based projects.
• Collaborate with product and tech teams to align with goals.
• Optimize performance, conduct tests, and review code.
• Implement monitoring and observability using modern tooling.

Skills

Java development

Object-oriented design

Design patterns

Clean code

English communication

Team collaboration

SDLC understanding

Education

Bachelor’s degree in software engineering or computer science

Tools

Spring

Hibernate

AWS

GCP

New Relic

Datadog

Grafana

Prometheus

Job description

Job Type Full-time

Workplace Hybrid

Posted September 18, 2026

About dlocal

dLocal started with one goal – to close the payments innovation gap between global enterprise companies, and customers in emerging economies. We have over 1000 payment methods, in more than 60 countries. We are relentlessly focusing on serving our customers and solidifying our position as the preferred infrastructure solution for Global Merchants across Emerging Markets. With the ability to accept local payment methods and facilitate cross-border fund settlement worldwide, our merchants reach billions of underserved consumers in the high-growth markets of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. dLocal offers the ideal payment solutions for global commerce:

• Payins: Accept local payment methods
• Payouts: Compliantly send funds cross-border
• dLocal for Platforms: Unify your platform’s payment solution

Financial technology for markets of the future.

We are looking for a highly skilled Staff Engineer to join us. This team is focused on optimizing payment performance across multiple dimensions: improving conversion rates, maximizing take rate, and keeping fraud and operational costs under control while ensuring compliance.

As a Staff Engineer, you will play a key role in designing and evolving the systems that power critical areas such as payment routing, fraud prevention, and anomaly detection. This includes building and scaling systems that intelligently decide which processors handle each transaction, developing real-time fraud decisioning tools based on data and machine learning models, and enabling proactive detection of anomalies across business and operational metrics.

You will work closely with cross-functional teams to design robust, scalable, and high-performance systems, ensuring they meet both current and future needs. Your expertise in system design and architecture will be essential in driving technical decisions, improving our platform, and helping the team navigate complex challenges.

This role requires a strong strategic mindset and the ability to understand the broader impact of technical decisions, as you’ll be contributing directly to the evolution of one of the most critical areas of our platform.

What will I be doing?

• Collaborate with technology leaders and the product team to understand department goals and requirements, translating them into technical solutions.
• Design, develop, and maintain high-quality Java applications and systems aligned with business objectives.
• Lead the technical architecture and design of Java-based projects, ensuring scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Create scalable architecture systems for Java-based applications, considering future growth and evolving business needs.
• Optimize application performance by identifying and addressing areas for improvement, such as code optimization, database query optimization, and resource utilization.
• Troubleshoot design flaws and system bottlenecks to enhance application stability and performance.
• Perform validation tests to ensure the flexibility and scalability of the Java environment, making necessary adjustments as needed.
• Conduct comprehensive system performance tests to identify bottlenecks, assess system capacity, and fine-tune application performance.
• Generate and present detailed systems reports, including performance metrics, bottlenecks, and recommendations for improvements.
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to maintain high standards of software development, ensuring code quality, readability, and adherence to best practices.

What skills do I need?

• Bachelor’s degree in software engineering or computer science.
• Minimum of 7 years of professional experience in Java development.
• Solid experience in Java application development and software architecture.
• In-depth knowledge of object-oriented design principles and design patterns.
• Ability to write clean, efficient, and readable code.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP (desired).
• Experience with Java development frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.
• Ability to solve complex software system issues.
• Good verbal and written communication skills.
• Being a team player, enjoying working with your own team and collaborating with other teams in the organization.
• Upper-intermediate written and spoken English proficiency.
• Well-versed in the software development life cycle.
• Experience with monitoring applications in production using telemetry tooling such as Newrelic, Datadog, Grafana + Prometheus, Dynatrace, CloudWatch, distributed logs like ELK, etc.