Staff Engineer (Ingeniero Staff) - Remote First

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options (ESOP)

Annual learning budget

Remote-first culture

Job summary

Clara is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide senior IC leadership across services and platforms. You will shape architecture, raise engineering standards, and ship production code while enabling multiple product areas.

This is a cross‑team, architecturally focused role: design for reliability and security, mentor engineers, drive RFCs, and lead incident response. Remote-first with occasional team in‑person moments.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in backend and/or frontend with cross‑team impact.
• Proven ability to design for high availability, security, and operability.
• Strong testing culture and experience with CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Cross‑team architecture — drive system design across pods with coherence and long‑term cost awareness.
• Engineering excellence — set standards for code quality, testing, observability, and secure design.
• Technical strategy — partner with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads, and Product on sequencing and debt.
• Mentorship & leveling‑up — coach Senior/Mid engineers through design reviews and pairing.
• Incident and reliability leadership — lead remediation for high‑severity incidents.
• Hands‑on delivery — author meaningful PRs and contribute code beyond architecture.

Skills

Backend architecture

Java/Spring

Microservices

Distributed systems

React/TypeScript

Kubernetes

AWS

Testing (TDD/BDD)

Code reviews

Tools

Kafka

PostgreSQL/MySQL

REST APIs

GitHub Actions

Job description

Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation. More than 50,000 leading and fast-growing businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the region’s fastest-growing company. We’re passionate about helping every company we work with become more effective—and, through that, raising the region’s competitiveness. We’re ~400 people, backed by Notable Capital, Coatue, Kaszek, monashees, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to provide senior individual-contributor technical leadership at Clara. This is an organization-level IC role: you shape architecture, raise engineering standards across pods, and multiply impact through design, code, and mentorship — not a people-manager position.

The Role

You are a builder and a technical authority beyond a single pod. You still write production code regularly, but your scope is cross-team: systems that span services, shared platforms, and hard technical bets that unlock multiple product areas.

This is a builder's role first. You are expected to ship code, lead by example in reviews and design docs, and leave clearer systems behind you — not only facilitate meetings.

What You Own

• Cross-team architecture — Drive system design for initiatives that cut across pods (APIs, data models, event flows, reliability patterns). Hold a high bar on coherence, operability, and long-term cost.
• Engineering excellence — Set and model standards for code quality, testing (TDD/BDD), observability, and secure design. Influence through RFCs, architecture reviews, and pairing — not through reporting lines.
• Technical strategy — Partner with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads, and Product on sequencing, tech debt, and platform investments. Make trade-offs explicit and documented.
• Mentorship & leveling-up — Grow Senior and Mid engineers via design reviews, deep pairing, and hiring signal. You provide strong input on technical fit; managers own career and performance outcomes.
• Incident and reliability leadership — Lead or co-lead response and remediation for high-severity incidents on systems you influence; drive durable fixes, not band-aids.
• Hands-on delivery — Author meaningful PRs. Staff at Clara is not an architecture-only title.

What You Don't Own

• 1:1s, performance ratings, compensation, or PIPs — those belong to Engineering Managers / Directors.
• Day-to-day sprint facilitation for a single pod (unless temporarily embedded); Pod Engineering Leads own pod execution rhythm.

Technical Skills

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, including substantial time as a Senior / Lead IC on complex systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one of:
  • Backend: Java (Spring / Spring Boot), microservices, scalable system design, PostgreSQL/MySQL and NoSQL data modeling, event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar), REST APIs, AWS, containers (Docker/Kubernetes).
  • Frontend: Production React + TypeScript at scale, component architecture, performance, testing (Jest, RTL, Cypress/Playwright), build/CI tooling.
• Ability to work and reason full-stack even if your depth is on one side: read the whole path from data model to API to UI.
• Proven experience designing for high availability, security, and operability in production.
• Strong testing culture (unit, integration, contract) and familiarity with CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Track record of written technical design that non-authors can challenge and execute against.

Soft Skills

• Demonstrated influence without formal authority — across teams and stakeholders.
• Clear communication of trade-offs to Product, Design, and leadership.
• Product mindset: you engage roadmaps and feasibility, not only tickets.
• Intellectual honesty: change direction when evidence demands it.
• Mentorship instincts; you leave teams stronger than you found them.
• Strong English; Spanish is a plus for LATAM collaboration.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience in financial applications, payments, or regulated LATAM markets.
• Prior Staff / Principal / Staff-equivalent title, or org-wide Tech Lead scope.
• Platform or developer-experience investments (shared libraries, internal tools, AI-assisted engineering workflows).
• Deep AWS (EKS, RDS, MSK, etc.) or security posture work (auth, supply chain).

Where we work

This is a remote-first role: you'll work from home day to day. You'll ramp up in person with the team, and come together in person for team moments, events and customer visits through the year.

Why Clara

• A high talent-density team driven to make an impact in Latin America — low ego, high ownership.
• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
• An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.
• English is our working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.

How we work

• Clarity — Open and direct communication: we say what we mean and give context where it matters.
• Simplicity — If it can be simpler, it should be.
• Ownership — We own everything we do, end to end. When something needs to happen, we don't wait.
• Pride — We hold ourselves to a high standard, and it shows in what we deliver.
• ABC (Always Be Changing) — We adapt fast, embrace change, and keep learning.
• Inclusivity — Diverse ideas, stories and perspectives build a better Clara.