Senior Staff / Principal Engineer - Digital Ecosystem

ABOUT NU
Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company has been leading an industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary technology to develop innovative products and services.
Guided by its mission to fight complexity and empower people, Nu caters to customers’ complete financial journey, promoting financial access and advancement with responsible lending and transparency. The company is powered by an efficient and scalable business model that combines low cost to serve with growing returns.
Nu’s impact has been recognized in multiple awards, including Time 100 Most Influential Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Banks.
Visit our Institutional Page https://www.nu.com/2026-en
OPPORTUNITY
We are hiring a Senior Staff or Principal Engineer to support driving the technical vision and execution for Ironwood Digital’s Digital Ecosystem division, with initial focus on NuPay, Ads & Rewards and Insurance. This is a division‑level leadership role: you will work with exceptional engineers (including staff engineers), lead cross‑org architectural decisions, negotiate trade‑offs with product/finance/legal, and enable scalable delivery of high‑impact products (checkout & wallet, advertiser platform and benefits hub, and 1‑click insurance products).
2026'S VISION AND (HOW THIS ROLE CONTRIBUTES)
In 2026 we will transform the Digital Ecosystem into a place where customers discover advantages, pay effortlessly and feel protected, and where merchants grow through data‑driven integrated partnerships. Our priorities are: (1) elevating app quality, (2) deepening customer engagement with contextual and personalized experiences, (3) making Ironwood Digital the preferred payments partner and growth engine for merchants, and (4) ensuring scalable, compliant, and financially healthy foundations. This role will own the technical plan to deliver that vision across NuPay, Ads & Rewards and Insurance.
MISSION DESIGN AND OPERATIONALIZE THE 2–3 YEAR TECHNICAL END‑STATE FOR THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM SO THAT:
– NuPay scales to become the de facto checkout and wallet for Ironwood Digital customers (TPV ×2 by Dec/26; wallet >3M MAU),
– Ads & Rewards delivers the Advantages Tab, a performant advertiser platform and Ads POC with merchants, and drives material ecosystem revenue,
– Insurance launches and scales high‑quality one‑click complements (Mobile Insurance Relaunch, Pix Protegido evolution), while maintaining aggressive SLOs, strong observability, controlled TCO and an elevated engineering culture.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
– Support defining the division’s technical end‑state (2–3 years): architecture, shard/partition strategy, migration path (one‑stack) and explicit trade‑offs (cost × latency × availability).
– Co-own availability and performance: set SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, runbooks, incident playbooks and an observability strategy that supports merchants with strict SLAs.
– Support Ads & Rewards platform design: advertiser platform (audience & campaign management), decision/bidding service, real‑time vs batch decisioning, measurement & attribution (ROAS/incrementality), and minimise impact on app UX.
– Drive NuPay ↔ Ads integration for aspirational purchases: real‑time underwriting, multi‑source funding, take‑rate modelling, card‑on‑file / wallet flows and onboarding for flagship merchants.
– Enable Insurance delivery: technical enablement for one‑click products, partner integration and governance (e.g., Chubb), migration to subscription/billing platform where applicable, and app quality improvements (TTFD, dashboards, NPS).
– Support one‑stack discovery and phased migration: balance platformization with pragmatic delivery and tech‑debt management to avoid blocking growth.
– Catalyse product quality culture: introduce and operationalize Product Quality Reviews, drive app excellence rituals, and ensure UX/technical quality are considered across the product lifecycle.
– Mentor and grow engineering leaders and staff engineers; run RFCs, tech talks and post‑mortems; design career paths and enable managers to deliver cross‑BU initiatives.
– Represent the division in cross‑org negotiations and external partner discussions (merchants, partners, regulators), aligning stakeholders and escalating risks proactively.
– Track and report technical impact against business metrics and engineering health indicators.
KEY BUSINESS & ENGINEERING METRICS YOU WILL INFLUENCE
– NuPay: TPV growth (2× by Dec/26), wallet MAU (>3M), share‑of‑checkout (SoC), p99 latency and availability for merchant traffic.
– Ads & Rewards: ad revenue targets (material ecosystem revenue), ROAS / iROAS / incrementality, CTR, Ads POC results (≥2 merchants), Advantages Tab / Shelves Platform launch.
– Insurance: one‑click complements GWP target (R$493M EOY), product NPS (>60 targets), churn reduction via billing/tolerance changes.
– Engineering health: Engineering Stability Index (ESI), App Quality Score, incident frequency/severity, time to integrate new partners.
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES (WHAT YOU’LL OWN)
– World‑class app quality & Magic App MVP: raise engineering and product expectations, and deliver first‑layer Magic App experiences (Advantages Tab, widgets, contextual flows such as AIPB).
– Real‑time decisioning and aspirational financing: enable low‑latency ads decisioning and NuPay real‑time underwriting for extended financing while preserving app performance.
– One‑click Insurance at scale: deliver MIR (no IMEI) and Pix Protegido evolution, dedicating energy to one‑click complements and partnering with Chubb while retaining monitoring/control.
– Capture offline transactions: accelerate NuPay NFC wallet adoption as an offensive play to reach ~3M MAU and increase offline SoC.
– Platform & compliance foundations: complete SPB integration, advance One‑Stack Project, meet Magic App and regulatory mandates, and ensure resilient, cost‑effective infra.
WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN THE TEAM
– High‑calibre engineers, including staff engineers and experienced engineering managers.
– Complex, high‑impact problems at scale: large merchant integrations, real‑time decisioning, strict SLOs and multi‑partner dependencies.
– Autonomy to shape architecture, product quality rituals and the division roadmap, plus the responsibility to align delivery across product, infra, legal and commercial stakeholders.
WHAT YOU’LL NAVIGATE
– Heavy cross‑BU dependencies (Global Platforms, Ironwood Digital+, UV, Marketing) requiring strong stakeholder orchestration.
– Regulatory changes (SPB/BCB) that may force re‑architecture or open‑scheme decisions.
– Dependence on third‑party vendors (wallet SDKs, insurance partners) and partner infra limitations.
– Balancing rapid commercialization and monetization with fraud/credit loss control and sustainable unit economics.
– Trade‑offs between accelerating one‑stack migration and accepting short‑term technical debt to preserve delivery velocity.
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.