Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation. 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.
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.
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.
- A high talent-density team driven to make an impact in Latin America — low ego, high ownership.
- Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
- An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.
- English is our working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.
- 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.
- Ownership — We own everything we do, end to end. When something needs to happen, we don't wait.
- Pride — We hold ourselves to a high standard, and it shows in what we deliver.
- ABC (Always Be Changing) — We adapt fast, embrace change, and keep learning.
- Inclusivity — 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.
Skills Required
- 8+ years building robust production systems
- Deep hands-on experience building fintech infrastructure in production
- Production experience with Pix, including SPI/DICT, QR/BR Code, devolução, MED, limits, fraud controls, and newer Pix flows
- Experience with digital accounts, onboarding, KYC/KYB, PLD-FT, ledgers, balances, holds, and blocks
- Experience with boletos, registradoras, CNAB 240 remessa/retorno, baixa, settlement, and reconciliation
- Production experience shipping Open Finance consents and payment initiation flows
- Experience owning software architectures used by other engineers
- Applied knowledge of idempotency, retries, outbox patterns, sagas, event-driven design, and consistency tradeoffs
- Hands-on experience with Kafka or other message brokers
- Experience with tracing, metrics, SLOs, alerting, and operational runbooks
- Deep expertise in Java and Spring Boot
- Solid PostgreSQL knowledge, API design, concurrency, and performance tuning
- Hands-on experience with React and TypeScript, including production payment user interfaces
- Experience with CI/CD, Docker, Git, and cloud platforms, preferably AWS
- Knowledge of security and privacy practices including tokenization, PII/LGPD, OAuth2, and OIDC
- Experience building systems from zero and shipping measurable product improvements
- Ability to integrate AI into discovery, design, implementation, review, debugging, and operations
- Experience with parallel agents, spec-driven prompting, review evaluations, and AI guardrails
- Professional English proficiency at B2 level or higher
- Ability to collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Operations, Compliance, and engineering teams
Clara Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Clara and has not been reviewed or approved by Clara.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity grants are emphasized across several descriptions, with stock options commonly included and in some instances available from day one. Feedback suggests this ownership component is a meaningful part of total rewards.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off offerings are portrayed as flexible, including references to flexible vacation and flexible time off policies. Feedback suggests this supports work–life balance for many roles.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Wellness support is cited through mental‑health platforms, coaching and meditation programs, and monthly wellness reimbursements in some contexts. Feedback suggests these offerings complement core benefits where available.
Clara Insights
What We Do
Clara is the leading payment platform for companies in Latin America. Our end-to-end solution includes our locally-issued corporate cards, Bill Pay, crossborder payments, and our highly-rated software platform used by thousands of the most successful companies across the region. Clara is backed by top global and regional investors such as Coatue, DST Global, General Catalyst, monashees, Kaszek, Canary, A*, BoxGroup, SV Angel, GFC, Picus Capital, Avid Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Goldman Sachs, and prominent angel investors. Driven by our six core values (Ownership, Pride, ABC, Simplicity, Clarity and Inclusivity) we’ve reached a unicorn valuation in record time, have been recognized as a Great Place to Work and as one of the most promising startups according to Linkedin’s ranking “Top Startups 2021”. We’re looking for the best talent worldwide to join our team and be part of this journey, so you can't afford to miss this chance! We are: * Shaping business finances in Latin America * Driven by our 6 core values * Proud of our inclusive and caring culture * Certified as a Great Place to Work and a Top LinkedIn Startup
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