Lead Software Engineer – Buenos Aires, Argentina (Hybrid)

About Us

Nu is one of the largest digital financial platforms in the world, with more than 127 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Guided by our mission to fight complexity and empower people, we are redefining financial services in Latin America and this is still just the beginning of the purple future we're building.

Listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NU), we combine proprietary technology, data intelligence, and an efficient operating model to deliver financial products that are simple, accessible, and human. Our impact has been recognized by global rankings such as Time 100 Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Bank. Visit our institutional page https://international.nubank.com.br/careers/.

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

Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Our Benefits

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

Chance of earning equity
Health Insurance
Life Insurance
NuCare
International business travel insurance
NuLanguage
Vacations
Parental leaves
Work from home allowance

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/.