Senior Staff Software Engineer

The role

You will lead complex, strategic technical initiatives end to end, from setting technical direction to code running in production. You will set architecture and standards across teams in an area such as payments, fraud, core banking or platform, and mentor senior engineers.

What you will do

• Lead complex, ambiguous, strategic initiatives end to end, from technical direction to production.
• Find the problems worth solving in your area and deliver scalable solutions.
• Shape mid- to long-term strategy with product and business leaders and turn it into a technical roadmap.
• Make high-stakes architecture decisions where no clear precedent exists.
• Set standards beyond your own team, such as design guidelines, quality bars and reusable components.
• Mentor senior engineers, managers and peers across teams, and take part in hiring.
• Represent Nu in technical conversations with external partners, platforms and vendors.

Required qualifications

• 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.
• Evidence that you ship, and you still write code and validate architecture in production.
• Strong judgment in ambiguous situations, with experience building systems from scratch and evolving large inherited ones.
• Ability to explain complex technical strategy clearly to engineers, product partners and senior leadership.
• A pragmatic, hands-on approach to AI, and measuring what it 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.
• Experience in regulated or otherwise unforgiving environments.
• Experience with LLMs, agent platforms or protocols such as MCP.
• Portuguese or Spanish.
• Clojure or functional programming experience.

Benefits

• Opportunity of earning equity at Nu (US and Brazil)
• Medical, dental and vision insurance (US)
• Life insurance and AD&D (US)
• Extended maternity and paternity leaves (US)
• Learning platform of courses (Nucleo)
• Language learning program (NuLanguage)
• Mental health and wellness assistance (NuCare)
• 401K savings plans, health savings account and flexible spending account (US)
• Work-from-home allowance
• Relocation assistance package, if applicable
• Food/meal card and public transportation benefit (Brazil)
• Medical and dental plans, daycare allowance and extended parental leave (Brazil)

Before you apply

• The recruitment process may use AI-enabled tools such as automated interview transcription and analysis; final hiring decisions are made by humans.
• Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback to candidates.

About the company

Nu serves more than 140 million customers with a mission to fight complexity and empower people. It builds proprietary technology and digital financial products at scale.