Staff Software Engineer – Database Infrastructure
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 beyond — and this is still just the beginning of the purple future we’re building.
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.
Learn more at: https://international.nubank.com.br/careers/
About the role
You will join Foundation, Nubank’s horizontal platforms organization, in the Storage & Databases area. This team is responsible for providing the database infrastructure that powers all of Nubank, owning canonical databases (such as DynamoDB and Datomic), common libraries, and regulatory data concerns across markets.
As a Staff Software Engineer – Foundation, you will be a senior technical leader working mostly across Datomic, provisioning and caching, operating horizontally across the org. You’ll design and evolve database and storage platforms that must scale to millions of customers and support Nubank’s expansion into new countries, while meeting strict regulatory and availability requirements.
This role is a great fit if you love deep database theory and infrastructure, enjoy working in highly senior technical environments, and want your work to be a critical enabler for dozens of product teams and new geographies.
You’ll be responsible for
- Designing and evolving Nubank’s storage and database platforms, with a primary focus on Datomic, provisioning and caching, ensuring they serve as reliable foundations for all product teams.
- Owning database infrastructure at scale, ensuring performance, availability and resiliency for systems that serve millions of customers and very high data volumes.
- Enabling new country launches from a storage and data perspective: guaranteeing that database architectures, configurations and operations support new regulatory and scalability requirements as Nubank enters new markets.
- Ensuring regulatory and data-safety compliance, including backups, multi-region availability strategies and protection of customer data in line with central bank and local regulations.
- Working horizontally across the engineering org, collaborating with many different teams that consume storage and database services, and shaping shared libraries, patterns and best practices they rely on.
- Participating in and leading incident response for storage and database-related production issues, helping teams debug complex failures under pressure and designing long-term fixes.
- Multiplying expertise in a very senior environment, mentoring other engineers and helping them navigate a deep, complex technical context over time.
We are looking for a person who has
Required
- Deep experience with databases: strong grounding in database theory and database infrastructure (design, operations, performance, reliability).
- Hands-on experience with large-scale data systems, having supported services with millions of users and/or very high data and traffic volumes.
- Strong familiarity with at least some of the technologies in our ecosystem, such as Kubernetes, Clojure and Datomic, or comparable stacks, and the ability to adapt and learn our specific tools.
- Backgrounds such as Database Administrator, Systems Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, DevOps Engineer or Software Engineer with a clear emphasis on databases and distributed systems.
- Proven ability to work in horizontal/platform teams, building and operating shared infrastructure and libraries used by many product teams.
- Excellent communication skills and emotional resilience: comfortable interacting with many teams, often in high-stress situations like production incidents, and able to keep a constructive, solutions-oriented posture.
- High learning agility and patience to navigate a very senior, deep technical environment, including working with peers at Staff and Principal level across Foundation.
Nice to have
- Experience in financial services or other regulated industries (not mandatory).
- Prior responsibility for multi-region, high-availability database architectures.
Location for this opportunity
- United States – any Nubank US office location
Work Model for this Role
Our Benefits – United States
For employees based in the US, we offer:
- Opportunity of earning equity at Nu
- Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs and benefits. Base salary range: $192k - $345k
- Medical Insurance
- Dental and Vision Insurance
- Life Insurance and AD&D
- Extended maternity and paternity leaves
- Nucleo – our learning platform of courses
- NuLanguage – our language learning program
- NuCare – our mental health and wellness assistance program
- 401(k)
- Saving Plans – Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account
- Work-from-home Allowance
- Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable
Location-Specific Disclosures
-
Palo Alto: Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs and benefits. Base salary range: $19.200 - $24.000
Join us
If you want to work at the heart of Nubank’s infrastructure — building and operating the storage and database platforms that enable our products to scale to millions of customers and new countries — we’d love to hear from you.
Apply now to be our Staff Software Engineer – Foundation (Storage & Databases) in the US.