Principal Engineer

About Nubank

Nu is the world's largest digital banking platform outside of Asia, serving over 123 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 Companies, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World's Best Banks. The Company is preparing for its next growth cycle where it will accelerate its internationalization process outside Latin America, and will also enter new verticals beyond financial services in its core markets taking advantage of the significant customer penetration.

Nubank History Video
Check out our Blog About Nu 

About the team 

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 Nubank 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 Nubank customers,
• 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.

About the role 

We are hiring a Senior Staff or Principal Engineer to support driving the technical vision and execution for Nubank'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).

Key responsibilities and Expectations

• 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.

Qualifications

 Professional Experience & Education:

• High Education Degree in Information Technology or Engineering Field preferred.
• Significant and proven experience as a senior Individual Contributor (IC) or equivalent position (e.g., Staff/Senior Staff Engineer) in high-growth technology companies.
• Demonstrated history in architecting and designing scalable and resilient systems.
• Prior experience in technical leadership roles or as a Software Developer early in the career.

Competences & Attributes:

• Fluency in English is mandatory.
• Ability to influence and manage complex and cross-functional stakeholders (Engineering, Product, Design, Business) without direct authority.
• Product-Centric Mindset, focus on driving innovation and delivering customer-centric products.
• Strong Business Acumen, with the capacity to analyze business and market dynamics to ensure engineering decisions are aligned with the company's strategic direction.

Role Location 

Brazil

Reports To

This position reports to Liciane Andreatta (Senior Director of Engineering)