Senior Staff Software Engineer
- Toronto, ON, Canada
Full-time
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Job details
- Job type
- Full-time
- Apply by
- Posting language
- English
- Posted
Original 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
WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS
Palo Alto, CA, USA
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
To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here
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
- 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.
- 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.
Palo Alto, CA, USA
- Miami, FL, USA
- McLean, VA, USA
- Toronto, ON, Canada
- São Paulo, Brazil
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
- Industry-competitive Canadian benefits provided by EOR
- 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
To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here
More about this job
Responsibilities
Lead strategic, complex engineering initiatives from technical direction through production delivery, identifying high-impact problems and shaping the area’s long-term technical roadmap. Make high-stakes architecture decisions, establish standards and reusable components across teams, mentor senior colleagues, support hiring and guilds, and represent Nu in external technical discussions.
Requirements
Candidates should have extensive Staff-level or higher experience designing, building, and operating high-scale, mission-critical systems, with a record of delivering cross-organizational initiatives and continuing to write and validate code in production. They should demonstrate strong judgment in ambiguous situations, communicate technical strategy effectively, use AI pragmatically, and be professionally fluent in English.
Skills
- High-scale Systems Design
- Mission-critical Systems
- Software Architecture
- Technical Strategy
- End-to-end Initiative Leadership
- Cross-functional Leadership
- Mentoring
- Artificial Intelligence
- Payments
- Fraud and Risk
- Digital Banking
- Large-scale Data Platforms
- Microservices
- Clojure
- Functional Programming
Benefits
- Equity
- Medical Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance
- Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance
- Extended Parental Leave
- Learning Platform
- Language Learning Program
- Mental Health and Wellness Assistance
- 401(k) Savings Plan
- Health Savings Account
- Flexible Spending Account
- Work-from-home Allowance
- Relocation Assistance
- Meal Card
- Public Transportation Benefit
- Psychological, Financial, and Legal Assistance
- Daycare Allowance
- Parental Consultancy
- Gym Partnerships
- Paid Vacation
Visa sponsorship
Not detected in the job text
Categories
- Software
- Technology
- Management & Leadership
- Finance & Accounting
Keywords
- Microservices
- Low-latency Payment Rails
- Large-scale Data Platforms
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Intelligence
- AI Agents
- Agentic Banking
- Payments
- Money Movement
- Fraud
- Identity
- Risk
- Core Banking
- Platform Engineering
- Infrastructure
- High-scale Systems
- Mission-critical Systems
- Software Architecture
- Technical Roadmaps
- Design Guidelines
- Reusable Components
- Regulated Markets
- Consumer-facing Products
- User Experience
- Large Language Models
- Agent Platforms
- MCP
- Clojure
- Functional Programming
- Financial Services