Senior Staff Software Engineer

Nubank; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 260,000 - 460,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity at Nu

Medical Insurance

Dental and Vision Insurance

Life Insurance

Extended maternity and paternity leave

401K Plan

Work-from-home Allowance

Job summary

Nu is expanding its engineering leadership with Senior Staff Software Engineers to drive large-scale, high-availability systems. You’ll set technical direction for critical areas, ship production-grade solutions, and raise the bar for multiple squads across the organization.

You’ll mentor engineers, participate in hiring, and partner with product and business leaders to shape long-term roadmaps. A strong AI focus and English fluency are essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience at Staff level or above (or equivalent) designing, building and running high-scale, mission-critical systems.
• Track record of leading initiatives across organizational boundaries with little formal authority and delivering results.
• Evidence of shipping, writing code and validating architecture in production.
• Strong judgment in ambiguous situations, with experience building systems from scratch or evolving large inherited ones.
• Able to explain complex technical strategy to engineers, product partners and leadership to build alignment.
• Pragmatic, hands-on approach to AI with measurable impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex, ambiguous, strategic initiatives end to end, from setting technical direction to production code.
• Identify problems worth solving and deliver scalable solutions impacting business results.
• Shape mid- to long-term strategy and translate it into technical roadmaps."
• Make high-stakes architecture decisions and guide teams through trade-offs.
• Set cross-team standards, guidelines, quality bars, and reusable components.
• Mentor senior engineers and participate in hiring; may sponsor guilds.

Skills

Staff-level experience

Leadership

System design

Production code

English fluency

Tools

Clojure

Cloud platforms

Job description

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.

Visit our Institutional Page

ABOUT THE ROLE

Nu runs a twelve-year-old platform that has never stopped growing: thousands of microservices, low-latency payment rails, large-scale data platforms, machine learning in the critical path, and one mobile app carrying a dozen financial products across several regulated markets. We are expanding into new countries, new lines of business and new interfaces, including AI agents that act on customers’ behalf. Many of the systems we need for that don’t exist yet.

We’re hiring Senior Staff Software Engineers to be the technical reference for an area of the business. You’ll find the problems worth solving, design and ship the solutions, and raise the bar for the teams around you. If Staff is about making a team succeed, Senior Staff is about making an organization succeed. You’ll be matched to a specific team based on your depth and interests. Current areas include agentic and AI-native banking, payments and money movement, fraud, identity and risk, core banking, and platform and infrastructure.

YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

• Leading complex, ambiguous, strategic initiatives end to end, from setting the technical direction through to code running in production.

• Spotting the problems worth solving in your area and delivering scalable solutions that change business results and strategy, not just roadmap items.

• Shaping your area’s mid- to long-term strategy with product and business leaders, then turning it into a technical roadmap others can build on.

• Making high-stakes architecture decisions where no clear precedent exists, and guiding teams through the trade-offs.

• Setting standards beyond your own team, including design guidelines, quality bars and reusable components that other squads adopt.

• Mentoring senior engineers, managers and peers across teams. You’ll also take part in hiring and lead or sponsor guilds.

• Representing Nu in technical conversations with external partners, platforms and vendors.

WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS

Required

• Extensive experience at Staff level or above (or equivalent) designing, building and running high-scale, mission-critical systems.

• A track record of leading initiatives across organizational boundaries with little formal authority, and of seeing them land.

• Evidence that you ship. You still write code and validate architecture in production.

• Strong judgment in ambiguous situations, and a history of building systems from scratch as well as evolving large ones you inherited.

• The ability to explain complex technical strategy clearly to engineers, product partners and senior leadership, and to build alignment around it.

• A pragmatic, hands-on approach to AI. You use it to get more done, and you measure what it actually delivers.

• Professional fluency in English.

Nice to have

• Experience in payments, card networks, fraud and risk, or digital banking.

• Experience building consumer-facing products at scale, with real product and UX sensibility.

• Experience in regulated or otherwise unforgiving environments, where correctness matters more than speed.

• Experience with LLMs, agent platforms or protocols such as MCP.

• Portuguese or Spanish.

• Clojure or functional programming experience. It’s our primary backend language, but it isn’t required: every engineer goes through an immersive Clojure onboarding.

LOCATIONS

Palo Alto, CA, USA · Miami, FL, USA · McLean, VA, USA · Toronto, ON, Canada · São Paulo, Brazil

WORK MODEL

This is a hybrid role, requiring attendance in the office 3 days per week. For more details, visit https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/

OUR BENEFITS

United States

• 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

Canada

• Industry-competitive Canadian benefits provided by EOR

Brazil

• Chance of earning equity at Nu

• Food/ Meal Card (Vale-Refeição and/or Vale Alimentação)

• Public Transportation Commuting Benefit (Vale-Transporte)

• NuCare – Psychological, Financial and Legal Assistance Program

• Life Insurance

• Medical Plan

• Dental Plan

• NuLanguage – Language Course Program

• Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses

• Extended Parental Leave

• Daycare Allowance

• Parental Consultancy

• Work-from-home Allowance

• Gym Partnerships

• 30 days of paid vacation

• Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable

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