About the role
About Nu
Nu serves more than 140 million customers, guided by a mission to fight complexity and empower people. The company has been leading an industry transformation through innovative products and human-centered services.
Proprietary technology and data at scale power Nu’s digital platform, built to promote financial access, advancement, and transparency. Its business model thrives on customer love and lower costs, feeding a flywheel of growth and profitability.
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You will join an engineering squad in our Berlin office working on distributed systems and platform infrastructure. Our products serve analytics engineers and business teams across the company, but this is primarily a systems engineering role (roughly 75% core software systems engineering, 25% data architecture). We value engineering depth: we build internal distributed solutions and understand the runtimes underneath, rather than only orchestrating managed tools.
As a Senior Software Engineer you will shape the architecture of our low-level infrastructure, orchestration frameworks and storage engines. You will lead technical design, resolve systemic bottlenecks in compute and streaming layers, and mentor engineers across squads, working with colleagues in Berlin, the US and Latin America.
What you will do
- Design and build core low-level services and distributed runtimes for Nubank’s global data platform, with high fault tolerance, elastic scale and sub-second event availability.
- Lead the design of compute orchestration frameworks on large Kubernetes clusters, improving scheduling throughput and resource utilization for complex data pipelines.
- Design and optimize high-throughput streaming and storage architectures using Apache Kafka and distributed database internals for mission-critical financial workloads.
- Find and remove performance, network and storage bottlenecks across the infrastructure stack to reduce latency.
- Work with Analytics Engineering leads and platform users to define internal APIs, developer toolchains and data modeling practices that speed up developers company-wide.
- Set standards for resilience testing, automated failover, observability and architectural documentation.
What you bring
- Substantial experience designing, scaling and operating mission-critical distributed systems and backend architectures in high-throughput production environments.
- Strong practical knowledge of container orchestration and systems management at scale, ideally Kubernetes internals and custom controllers or operators.
- Advanced proficiency in a systems-oriented language such as Go, Java, Scala, Rust or C++.
- Experience with database system architecture (storage engines, indexing, replication) and/or event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka.
- A track record of technical leadership: writing design proposals, aligning teams on complex technical decisions, and mentoring engineers.
Nice to have
- Experience building internal developer platforms, custom compute engines or low-level database products.
- Experience with data platforms or compute runtimes that support production AI/ML training and inference.
- Familiarity with multi-region AWS networking, security, IAM and compute.
- Involvement in open-source distributed systems projects (e.g. Kubernetes, Kafka, data orchestration).
What we offer
We offer a competitive base salary in line with market rates, depending on experience and skills, along with:
- Learning and wellness allowance
- Vacations of 28 working days
- Opportunity of earning equity at Nu
- NuLanguage - Our language learning program
- Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses
- NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program
- Extended maternity and paternity leaves
- Life Insurance and AD&D
- Work-from-home Allowance
- Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable
Work Model
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/
Our working language is English.
Equal opportunity
We believe diversity makes our products and our teams better. We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of gender, ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age, or sexual identity. Severely disabled applicants with equivalent qualifications will be given preference.
Data protection
Your data is processed by Nubank in line with the GDPR. Details, including retention periods, are in our Candidate Privacy Notice on our careers page.
Our recruitment process may involve the use of artificial intelligence–enabled tools, such as automated interview transcription and analysis, to support the evaluation process. Artificial intelligence is not used to make final hiring decisions; all decisions are made by human reviewers.
To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here