The posting
Clara is the leading spend management platform in Latin America. More than 40,000 businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the fastest-growing company in Latin America. We're ~400 people, backed by Kaszek, monashees, Coatue, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others.
We are looking for a Staff Engineer to provide senior individual-contributor technical leadership at Clara. This is an organization-level IC role: you shape architecture, raise engineering standards across pods, and multiply impact through design, code, and mentorship — not a people-manager position.
The Role
You are a builder and a technical authority beyond a single pod. You still 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.
This is a builder's role first. You are expected to ship code, lead by example in reviews and design docs, and leave clearer systems behind you — not only facilitate meetings.
What You Own
- Cross-team architecture — Drive system design for initiatives that cut across pods (APIs, data models, event flows, reliability patterns). Hold a high bar on coherence, operability, and long-term cost.
- Engineering excellence — Set and model standards for code quality, testing (TDD/BDD), observability, and secure design. Influence through RFCs, architecture reviews, and pairing — not through reporting lines.
- Technical strategy — Partner with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads, and Product on sequencing, tech debt, and platform investments. Make trade-offs explicit and documented.
- Mentorship & leveling-up — Grow Senior and Mid engineers via design reviews, deep pairing, and hiring signal. You provide strong input on technical fit; managers own career and performance outcomes.
- Incident and reliability leadership — Lead or co-lead response and remediation for high-severity incidents on systems you influence; drive durable fixes, not band-aids.
- Hands-on delivery — Author meaningful PRs. Staff at Clara is not an architecture-only title.
What You Don't Own
- 1:1s, performance ratings, compensation, or PIPs — those belong to Engineering Managers / Directors.
- Day-to-day sprint facilitation for a single pod (unless temporarily embedded); Pod Engineering Leads own pod execution rhythm.
Technical Skills
- 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 (Kafka or similar), REST APIs, AWS, containers (Docker/Kubernetes). Frontend: Production React + TypeScript at scale, component architecture, performance, testing (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.
Soft Skills
- Demonstrated influence without formal authority — across teams and stakeholders.
- Clear communication of trade-offs to Product, Design, and leadership.
- Product mindset: you engage roadmaps and feasibility, not only tickets.
- Intellectual honesty: change direction when evidence demands it.
- Mentorship instincts; you 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).
Why Clara
- A high talent-density team driven to make an impact in Latin America — low ego, high ownership.
- Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
- An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.
- English is our working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.
How we work
- Clarity — Open and direct communication: we say what we mean and give context where it matters.
- Simplicity — If it can be simpler, it should be.
- Ownership — We own everything we do, end to end. When something needs to happen, we don't wait.
- Pride — We hold ourselves to a high standard, and it shows in what we deliver.
- ABC (Always Be Changing) — We adapt fast, embrace change, and keep learning.
- Inclusivity — Diverse ideas, stories and perspectives build a better Clara.
Hybrid at Clara
Claridians split their time between the office, customers and home. We don't set a minimum number of office days for most roles, but we expect you to spend time there naturally, and most days during your ramp-up or when your leader asks.
If you meet the must-haves, apply — the nice-to-haves are a bonus, not a requirement.
