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Clara is the leading spend management platform in Latin America, serving 40,000+ businesses with corporate cards, bill pay, financing, and B2B payments. The company is ~400 people, backed by top-tier VCs (Kaszek, Coatue, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst, Goldman Sachs), and was named the fastest-growing company in Latin America by the Financial Times in 2025.
We are seeking a Staff Engineer to provide senior individual-contributor technical leadership across the organization. This is an organization-level IC role—not a people-manager position. You will shape architecture, raise engineering standards across pods, and multiply impact through design, code, and mentorship.
You are a builder first. You will write production code regularly, but your scope is cross-team: systems that span services, shared platforms, and hard technical bets that unlock multiple product areas. You lead by example in code reviews and design docs, leaving clearer systems behind you.
Key responsibilities:
- Drive cross-team architecture for initiatives cutting across pods (APIs, data models, event flows, reliability patterns), holding a high bar on coherence, operability, and long-term cost.
- Set and model standards for code quality, testing (TDD/BDD), observability, and secure design through RFCs, architecture reviews, and pairing.
- Partner with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads, and Product on sequencing, tech debt, and platform investments; make trade-offs explicit and documented.
- Grow Senior and Mid engineers via design reviews, deep pairing, and hiring signal; provide strong input on technical fit.
- Lead or co-lead response and remediation for high-severity incidents on systems you influence; drive durable fixes.
- Author meaningful PRs and deliver hands-on technical work.
You will not own 1:1s, performance ratings, compensation, or PIPs (those belong to Engineering Managers/Directors), nor day-to-day sprint facilitation for a single pod unless temporarily embedded.
Clara works in a hybrid model: team members split time between office, customers, and home. No minimum office days are set for most roles, but you are expected to spend time in the office naturally and most days during ramp-up or when your leader asks.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering, including substantial time as a Senior/Lead IC on complex systems.
- Deep expertise in at least one of: Backend (Java/Spring/Spring Boot, microservices, scalable system design, PostgreSQL/MySQL and NoSQL data modeling, event-driven architectures like Kafka, REST APIs, AWS, Docker/Kubernetes) or Frontend (production React + TypeScript at scale, component architecture, performance, testing frameworks like Jest/RTL/Cypress/Playwright, build/CI tooling).
- Ability to work and reason full-stack even if your depth is on one side; read the whole path from data model to API to UI.
- Proven experience designing for high availability, security, and operability in production.
- Strong testing culture (unit, integration, contract) and familiarity with CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
- Track record of written technical design that non-authors can challenge and execute against.
- Demonstrated influence without formal authority across teams and stakeholders.
- Clear communication of trade-offs to Product, Design, and leadership.
- Product mindset: engage roadmaps and feasibility, not only tickets.
- Intellectual honesty: change direction when evidence demands it.
- Mentorship instincts; leave teams stronger than you found them.
- Strong English; Spanish is a plus for LATAM collaboration.
Nice-to-have:
- Experience in financial applications, payments, or regulated LATAM markets.
- Prior Staff/Principal/Staff-equivalent title or org-wide Tech Lead scope.
- Platform or developer-experience investments (shared libraries, internal tools, AI-assisted engineering workflows).
- Deep AWS (EKS, RDS, MSK, etc.) or security posture work (auth, supply chain).
