Staff Software Engineer – Remote First

Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation.

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.

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.

About Clara

More than 50,000 leading and fast-growing businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the region’s fastest-growing company. We’re passionate about helping every company we work with become more effective—and, through that, raising the region’s competitiveness. We’re ~400 people, backed by Notable Capital, Coatue, Kaszek, monashees, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others.

Responsibilities

• Talk to clients and internal Ops, read the regulatory docs, ruthlessly cut scope, write the one-pager, and tell us what not to build.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• Lead design and code reviews, establish engineering standards, and mentor the engineers who will inherit what you build.
• Deep, hands-on experience building fintech infrastructure in production, specifically
• SPI/DICT, QR/BR Code, devolução and MED, limits and fraud controls, and newer flows like Pix Automático or parcelado.
• Onboarding and KYC/KYB, PLD-FT, ledger and balance modeling, holds, and blocks.
• Consents and payment initiation flows shipped to production.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or other message brokers.
• Tracing, metrics, SLOs, alerting, and writing runbooks you’d actually be willing to be paged by.
• Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot, with solid PostgreSQL knowledge, API design, concurrency, and performance tuning.
• 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.

Requirements

• 8+ years building robust production systems, with a track record of owning architectures that other engineers depend on.
• Applied knowledge of idempotency, retries, outbox patterns, sagas, event-driven design, and consistency tradeoffs. You choose "boring" where boring wins.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• Professional English proficiency (B2+).
• Highly comfortable collaborating cross-functionally with Product, Design, Ops, Compliance, and Backend teams.
• Why Clara

A high talent-density team

• driven to make an impact in Latin America — low ego, high ownership.
• English is our working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.
• We own everything we do, end to end. When something needs to happen, we don't wait.
• We adapt fast, embrace change, and keep learning.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
• An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.

Pride

• Diverse ideas, stories and perspectives build a better Clara.
• If you meet the must-haves, apply — the nice-to-haves are a bonus, not a requirement.

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

Boletos

Registradoras, CNAB 240 remessa/retorno, baixa, settlement, and reconciliation.

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.

• We hold ourselves to a high standard, and it shows in what we deliver.
• ABC (Always Be Changing)