Staff Engineer (LatAm Only)

At R2, we believe that small and medium businesses are the productive engine of society. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) make up over 90% of companies in Latin America, yet they face a trillion-dollar credit gap. Our mission is to unlock SMBs’ potential by providing financial solutions tailored to their needs. We are reimagining the financial infrastructure of Latin America, where SMBs’ financial needs are met without ever having to go to a bank.

R2 enables platforms across Latin America to embed financial services that SMBs can leverage, starting with revenue-based financing. We are a high-performing, close-knit team with talent from organizations such as Google, Amazon, Nubank, Uber, Capital One, Mercado Libre, Globant, and J.P. Morgan. 

We are entering a new phase of growth following a strategic investment from Ant International, focused on rapidly expanding our partner footprint, strengthening our credit and underwriting capabilities, and scaling operations across multiple markets. As part of this growth journey, eligible team members have the opportunity to participate in R2’s Phantom Share Program, a performance-based incentive designed to align our team with the company’s long-term success and value creation. We believe in building a culture of ownership, where those who help create value share meaningfully in it.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) to set technical direction across our core platform. It's a hands-on, high-leverage role for someone who thrives on scope and ambiguity; you'll operate across team boundaries, raise the engineering bar for everyone around you, and stay close enough to the code to build the hardest parts yourself.

What You'll Do:

• Partner directly with the Head of Platform Engineering to shape and execute these critical, company-defining projects, translating strategy into architecture and shipped systems.
• Own product and solution architecture across multiple services and teams, not just your own surface area.
• Design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and systems (REST and/or gRPC) that are scalable, observable, and safe to operate.
• Set company-wide standards for reliability, code quality, and engineering practice — and get teams to actually adopt them.
• Drive a "you build it, you own it" culture: services shipped with the metrics, tracing, dashboards, SLOs, and alerting needed to be owned end-to-end by the team that builds them.
• Champion trunk-based development, feature flags, and safe, incremental delivery as the default way we ship.
• Lead large refactors that pay down structural debt without disrupting delivery, and mentor engineers on doing the same.
• Research and invest in tooling that makes the whole engineering org more productive (with a focus on the AI space).
• Ensure delivery of mission-critical systems under tight deadlines and push relentlessly toward a zero-bug bar.
• Think about security throughout everything you do.
• Grow the engineers around you — fostering learning, risk-taking, and accountability, and multiplying your impact through others.

Who You Are:

• 8+ years of engineering experience building API-driven services, with the appetite and ability to code on a daily basis.
• Deep expertise designing and constructing web services in REST and/or gRPC, from interface design through production operation.
• Strong track record with distributed architecture patterns, in particular microservices and monolith decomposition — you've done this at real scale, not just on a whiteboard.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing event-driven architectures.
• Experience with change data capture (CDC) — streaming changes out of operational databases (e.g., Postgres WAL / logical replication, Debezium, or equivalent) to power replication, event pipelines, and downstream analytics.
• High proficiency with observability across all three pillars — traces, metrics, and logs. Deep hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry for instrumentation, and with metrics systems (Prometheus and PromQL, or equivalent) for defining SLIs, dashboards, and alerting — and using that telemetry to actually drive decisions.
• Solid, demonstrable refactoring ability: you can restructure large, load-bearing codebases safely and incrementally.
• Fluent with trunk-based development, feature flags, and continuous, low-risk delivery.
• Strong proficiency in Go (required). Additional experience with Java, Python, or Rust is a plus.
• Experience designing and implementing robust production data models using databases like PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and/or Snowflake — including data lifecycle, retention, and archival concerns.
• Solid grasp of the OLTP–OLAP divide — designing transactional systems for low-latency operational workloads while feeding analytical stores (e.g. Snowflake) for reporting and analytics, and knowing where each belongs.
• Experience with containers (Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience designing and operating full-text search (e.g. Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, or PostgreSQL full-text search) in production — indexing, relevance, and query performance at scale.
• Professional working proficiency in both English and Spanish (required) — you'll collaborate across teams and markets in both languages daily.
• The judgment and communication skills to influence technical direction across teams and align engineers and stakeholders around a shared plan.
• Prior experience in fintech, banking, payments, or lending — especially in regulated, high-reliability environments where correctness and auditability are non-negotiable.
• Experience building systems that move money: payments, ledgers, settlement, reconciliation, or double-entry accounting, with a healthy respect for idempotency, exactly-once semantics, and consistency guarantees.
• Familiarity with financial-grade correctness concerns — handling money without floating point, transaction integrity, immutability, and building for auditability from day one.
• Experience integrating with third-party financial rails and partners: banks, acquirers, card networks, payment processors, or KYC/identity providers.
• Exposure to fraud, risk, or credit-decisioning systems, and the real-time data pipelines that feed them.
• Understanding of financial regulatory and compliance concerns (PCI DSS, SOC 2, data residency, PII handling) and how they shape system design.
• Experience operating high-availability, low-latency systems where downtime has direct financial and trust consequences, and designing for graceful degradation and disaster recovery.
• Experience with cold storage / tiered storage architectures and data-lifecycle management at scale.
• Familiarity with agent/LLM infrastructure,  MCP, policy engines (e.g., OPA/Rego), event streaming, and vector stores.
• Portuguese proficiency, a plus as we expand into Brazil.

What We Offer:

• The chance to join a high-impact, mission-driven fintech with regional scale
• Cross-functional collaboration with exceptional teams across Latin America
• Equipment provided by R2
• Training budget for professional development
• Career growth within R2

Location: São Paulo, Buenos Aires or Santiago.