Staff Engineer (Remote First)

About the role

Clara is a Latin American payment platform serving more than 50,000 businesses, and it is looking for a Staff Engineer to provide senior individual-contributor technical leadership. This is an organization-level IC role: you shape architecture, raise engineering standards across pods and multiply impact through design, code and mentorship, not as a people manager. It is remote first, with in-person ramp-up and occasional team moments.

Key responsibilities

• Drive cross-team system design (APIs, data models, event flows, reliability patterns) with a focus on coherence, operability and long-term cost.
• Set standards for code quality, testing (TDD/BDD), observability and secure design, influencing through RFCs, architecture reviews and pairing.
• Partner with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads and Product on sequencing, tech debt and platform investments, making trade-offs explicit and documented.
• Mentor Senior and Mid engineers through design reviews, deep pairing and hiring input.
• Lead or co-lead response and remediation of high-severity incidents and drive durable fixes.
• Ship production code regularly, author meaningful PRs and lead by example in reviews and design docs.

Required profile

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, including substantial time as a Senior or Lead IC on complex systems.
• Proven experience designing for high availability, security and operability in production.
• Demonstrated influence without formal authority, clear communication of trade-offs, and a product mindset.
• Strong English; Spanish is a plus.

Required skills

• Backend: Java (Spring / Spring Boot), microservices, PostgreSQL/MySQL and NoSQL, Kafka or similar, REST APIs, AWS, Docker/Kubernetes.
• Frontend: React and TypeScript at scale, Jest, RTL, Cypress/Playwright, CI/CD tooling.
• Full-stack reasoning, unit/integration/contract testing, GitHub Actions, and written technical designs.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
• An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.
• English as the working language, with Spanish and Portuguese daily.