Lead Systems Engineer (Kafka)

Nubank; United States; On-site; USD 210,000 - 252,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Pension Plan

Extended maternity and paternity leave

Nucleo - Learning platform

NuLanguage - Language learning program

NuCare - Mental health program

Vacations

Job summary

Nubank is seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer to evolve and operate its messaging platform and the infrastructure for asynchronous communication at scale. The role covers a large, multi-account AWS environment with Kubernetes-backed infrastructure, driving reliability and platform excellence across multiple business domains and countries.

You will own important technical problems, improve observability, and shape engineering decisions in partnership with the team.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production distributed systems.
• Kubernetes, networking, and AWS in large-scale environments.
• Operate infrastructure-heavy platforms with high reliability.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues across app, infra, network.
• Improve observability, automation, and operational tooling.
• Understand scalability, resilience, performance and failure isolation patterns.
• Work autonomously on ambiguous technical problems and execute.
• Collaborate across teams.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

AWS

Observability & automation

Troubleshooting

Autonomy

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Apache Kafka

Platform engineering

SRE practices

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.

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

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.