Lead Software Engineer

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.

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About the role

Our Engineering team helps Nu create and scale the technology that powers the best financial products in Latin America. We strive for state-of-the-art software development practices, using a variety of technologies and architectures to build resilient, secure, and highly scalable systems.

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping the technical direction of multiple teams, driving the design and evolution of large-scale distributed systems that serve millions of customers. While we value experience with our tech stack, we are confident that engineers who are eager to learn will be successful here — and we will teach you Clojure as our main backend language.

You will build and evolve:

• Horizontally scalable microservices written mostly in Clojure, using Finagle and leveraging functional programming techniques and hexagonal architecture

• High-throughput jobs and inter-service communication using Kafka

• Continuous Integration and Deployment pipelines on AWS

• Data storage solutions using Datomic and DynamoDB

• Monitoring and observability with Prometheus

• Services running as much as possible in Kubernetes

We are a process-light organization that values human interactions. We work in small, independent teams that feel like startups within the company and avoid unnecessary coupling and centralization whenever realistic. We understand that execution is key to success and continuously optimize our processes to remove bottlenecks.

You'll be responsible for

• Working with large-scale distributed systems and understanding their broad architecture and trade-offs

• Setting technical direction for multiple teams, ensuring alignment with Business Areas and architecture strategies

• Driving pragmatic innovation while ensuring resilient, secure, and flexible solutions that scale across products and geographies

• Mentoring engineers across teams and helping maintain a high technical bar organization-wide

• Writing, testing, instrumenting, documenting, and maintaining high-quality code

• Pairing and participating in code reviews to support the growth of others in and around your teams

• Collaborating closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leaders to build new end-to-end experiences

• Ensuring comprehensive observability, performance monitoring, and robust error handling across team services

• Participating in on-call rotations for your team and responding to incidents as necessary

• Focusing primarily on backend applications, while being open to contributing to mobile and frontend development according to business needs

We are looking for a person who has

• At least 8 years of experience developing digital products in complex environments

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices architecture, and cloud technologies

• A proven track record of designing and delivering large-scale systems that serve thousands or millions of users

• A strong background in object-oriented or functional programming languages, with the ability to work across multiple languages

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives across multiple teams, even without direct authority

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across organizations

• Practical knowledge of agile software development methodologies and prior experience with CI/CD

• Strong communication skills to identify and prevent risks, and explain trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Advanced English skills

Location

Mexico City, Mexico.

Our Benefits

Our benefits are designed to support your wellbeing, development, and life outside of work. For Mexico, they include:

• Chance of earning equity at Nu

• Extended maternity and paternity leaves

• Health and life insurance

• Dental and Vision Insurance

• NuCare – our mental health and wellness assistance program

• Nucleo – our learning platform of courses

• NuLanguage – our language learning program

• Holiday Bonus (“Aguinaldo”) of 30 days of pay per year

• 17 days of paid vacation with 25% vacation bonus

• Gym partnership

• Food card

• Work-from-home Allowance

• Parental Consultancy

• Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable

Even if you feel you don't meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply — your unique skills and experiences may be just what we're looking for, and we're excited to learn more about what you can bring to our team.

Work Model for this Role

Hybrid 2–3 times/week: Our hybrid work model brings us to the office at least twice a week, on strategic days designed to maximize team connection and collaboration. For more details, visit  https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/.

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