[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @Clara

Role Description

Clara’s Payments Tribe builds the money movement engine behind our platform: digital accounts, Pix, boletos, payouts, ledger, and reconciliation. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to own critical initiatives end-to-end—from framing the initial problem to running the solution seamlessly in production across Brazilian payment rails.

• Navigate ambiguity with confidence.
• Take initiatives from vague problem statements to shipped solutions, acting as the single thread of accountability for the deliverables under your scope.
• Own the problem:
  • Talk to clients and internal Ops.
  • Read the regulatory docs.
  • Ruthlessly cut scope.
  • Write the one-pager.
  • Tell us what not to build.
• Own the architecture:
  • Define service boundaries, data models, event flows, and consistency guarantees.
  • Design systems for money that cannot be duplicated, lost, or silently double-counted.
• Own the direction:
  • Own the technical roadmap for one or more Payments domains.
  • Set the patterns (ledger, idempotency, reconciliation) that other verticals adopt.
  • Your designs become the reference implementation, not just the Payments implementation.
• Own the delivery (with AI as leverage):
  • Orchestrate multiple AI agents in parallel for scaffolding, code generation, testing, and specs.
  • Serve as the expert judgment layer that catches what the models get wrong.
• Raise the bar:
  • Lead design and code reviews.
  • Establish engineering standards.
  • Mentor the engineers who will inherit what you build.

Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on experience building fintech infrastructure in production, specifically:
• Pix: SPI/DICT, QR/BR Code, devolução and MED, limits and fraud controls, and newer flows like Pix Automático or parcelado.
• Digital Accounts: Onboarding and KYC/KYB, PLD-FT, ledger and balance modeling, holds, and blocks.
• Boletos: Registradoras, CNAB 240 remessa/retorno, baixa, settlement, and reconciliation.
• Open Finance: Consents and payment initiation flows shipped to production.
• Experience: 8+ years building robust production systems, with a track record of owning architectures that other engineers depend on.
• Applied knowledge of money movement fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or other message brokers.
• Experience with tracing, metrics, SLOs, alerting, and writing runbooks.
• Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot, with solid PostgreSQL knowledge, API design, concurrency, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with React and TypeScript.
• Experience with CI/CD, Docker, Git, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
• Product sense: Built systems from zero and shipped features nobody explicitly asked for.
• Strong writing skills.
• Comfortable pushing back on timelines and priorities.
• AI-native working style: Integrate AI across discovery, design, implementation, review, debugging, and operations.
• Professional English proficiency (B2+).
• Highly comfortable collaborating cross-functionally with Product, Design, Ops, Compliance, and Backend teams.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.