Lead Systems Engineer - Traffic Management

Nubank; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 184,000 - 276,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Medical Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Life Insurance

Parental Leave

Learning platform

Language learning program

Wellness program

401K

Savings Plan

Work-from-home allowance

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Nubank in Palo Alto is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to own the Traffic Management platform, driving reliability, scalability, and security of the service mesh across regions. The role focuses on evolving Istio-based policies, improving observability, and incident response to enable fast yet safe product delivery.

You will collaborate with engineers, product and partner teams, leverage AI-assisted workflows, and contribute to docs and runbooks while participating in on-call rotations

Qualifications

• Operated large-scale, high-performance synchronous distributed systems in the cloud, with load balancers, TLS/mTLS and routing.
• Hands-on with Kubernetes-based infrastructure and IaC tooling — manifests, routing and deployment strategies.
• Uses AI daily to investigate issues, write and review code, and automate repetitive work while ensuring quality.
• Led end-to-end infrastructure platform projects from design to production go-live.
• Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies for traffic policies and observability.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end milestones on the traffic platform from problem definition to rollout and follow-up.
• Analyze options and trade-offs to balance reliability, performance and security.
• Ensure the stability and quality of shipped work with testing and observability.
• Collaborate with engineers, product and partner teams to translate needs into milestones.
• Create clear technical documentation and runbooks for the traffic platform.

Skills

Kubernetes

Service mesh

AI in engineering

Observability

Cloud networking

Tools

Pulumi

Terraform

AWS

DNS (Route 53)

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.

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.

Visit our Institutional Page

About The Role

The Traffic Management team keeps Nubank's customer‑facing and internal services reachable and secure. It is the layer that routes and protects every service request, from mobile app entry points to service‑to‑service calls across all our regions and environments. This function owns the strategy and execution for our service mesh ensuring our products can scale safely as we grow and expand. In this role, you will drive the reliability, scalability and security of this critical platform, evolving our service mesh, strengthening resilience and observability, and pushing our capabilities so that product teams can ship quickly without compromising stability.

You'll be responsible for

• Lead and Deliver end‑to‑end milestones on the traffic platform, from problem definition to rollout and follow‑up, breaking complex problems into clear tasks and keeping progress and risks visible for the team and key stakeholders.
• Take ownership of complex and sometimes ambiguous problems, analyzing options and trade‑offs, and proposing clear, pragmatic solutions that balance reliability, performance, security and effort.
• Ensure the stability and quality of what you and the team ship: design with failure in mind, put the right tests and observability in place, and react quickly to incidents, driving follow‑ups that prevent them from happening again.
• Collaborate with engineers, product and partner teams to understand needs, align on priorities and turn them into clear technical plans and milestones that are connected to the team's goals.
• Use AI and agents in an AI‑first way in your routine to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solution options and automate repetitive work, helping the squad adopt safe, effective AI workflows rather than just individual usage.
• Create and maintain clear technical documentation and runbooks that help other engineers understand, use and operate the traffic platform with confidence, and share knowledge through reviews, sessions and participation in function‑level initiatives.
• Help other engineers grow by giving and receiving feedback through code reviews, design discussions, pairing and day‑to‑day collaboration, acting as a reference for good engineering practices inside the team.
• Participate in support and on‑call routines for the area, using incidents, tickets and metrics as input to suggest and drive medium‑term improvements to the platform and to how we work.

We Are Looking For a Person Who Has

• Operated large-scale, high-performance synchronous distributed systems in the cloud, working directly with load balancers, reverse proxies, TLS/mTLS and routing, and using metrics, logs and traces to debug issues, optimize performance and improve overall reliability.
• Worked hands-on with Kubernetes-based infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-Code tooling — defining and evolving manifests, routing and deployment strategies, and managing DNS configuration — with a solid understanding of how these pieces fit together to deliver resilient traffic paths in production.
• Uses AI as part of their daily engineering workflow, leveraging AI tools and agents to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solutions and automate repetitive work, while consistently validating outputs and holding quality and safety as non-negotiable standards.
• Led end-to-end infrastructure platform projects from design to production go-live, breaking work into clear milestones, coordinating across stakeholders, managing risks and trade-offs, and following through post-rollout to stabilize and evolve the solution.
• Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies such as Linkerd or Envoy-based solutions — or legacy stacks like Finagle — designing and evolving traffic policies, resilience features and observability for service-to-service communication.
• Worked with AWS networking and compute primitives (ALB/NLB, security groups, VPC, Route 53, IAM) in production environments, with an understanding of how these layers interact with application traffic.
• Hands-on experience using Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to design, version and roll out changes to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure in a safe, repeatable way.
• Previously built platform capabilities or shared libraries for other engineers — abstractions, SDKs or internal tooling — that make it easier and safer for product teams to consume traffic and networking capabilities at scale.

Location

• Durham, United States
• Miami, United States
• Palo Alto, United States
• Washington DC, 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 for this Role

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/

Location-Specific Disclosures

• Palo Alto: Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs and benefits. Base salary range: $15,360 - $23,040

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.