Staff Software Engineer

 Staff Software Engineer

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.

The role

In this role, you will navigate ambiguity with confidence. You will 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, and tell us what not to build.
• Own the architecture: Define service boundaries, data models, event flows, and consistency guarantees. You will 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 and 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. You will serve as the expert judgment layer that catches what the models get wrong.
• Raise the bar: Lead design and code reviews, establish engineering standards, and mentor the engineers who will inherit what you build.

Must-haves

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. (Note: Please specify if you require experience as a Direct Participant or if integrating via a BaaS provider is acceptable).
• 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.

Architecture and system design

• Experience: 8+ years building robust production systems, with a track record of owning architectures that other engineers depend on.
• Money Movement Fundamentals: Applied knowledge of idempotency, retries, outbox patterns, sagas, event-driven design, and consistency tradeoffs. You choose "boring" where boring wins.
• Event Streaming: Hands-on experience with Kafka or other message brokers.
• Observability: Tracing, metrics, SLOs, alerting, and writing runbooks you’d actually be willing to be paged by.
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Fullstack execution 

• Backend: Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot, with solid PostgreSQL knowledge, API design, concurrency, and performance tuning.
• Frontend: Hands-on experience with React and TypeScript. You’ve shipped real UI—including the unglamorous states of a payment (pending, failed, reversed, disputed)—not just tutorials.
• Infrastructure & Security: Experience with CI/CD, Docker, Git, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred). Security and privacy by default (tokenization, PII/LGPD, OAuth2/OIDC).

Product sense

• You’ve built systems from zero and shipped features nobody explicitly asked for because you understood the user better than the roadmap did (and you can point to the metric that moved).
• You write well. A clear one-pager beats a long meeting.
• You’re comfortable pushing back and saying, “we’re not doing that this quarter.”

AI-native working style

• You seamlessly integrate AI across discovery, design, implementation, review, debugging, and operations.
• You can walk us through a real workflow you’ve automated, including a time a model was confidently wrong and how your guardrails caught it.
• You work with parallel agents, spec-driven prompting, and review evals. You build guardrails by design: no customer data in prompts, no unreviewed code in production.

Communication

• Professional English proficiency (B2+).
• Highly comfortable collaborating cross-functionally with Product, Design, Ops, Compliance, and Backend teams.