Staff Engineer; Ingeniero ; Remote First

Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation. More than 50,000 leading and fast-growing businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the region’s fastest-growing company. We’re passionate about helping every company we work with become more effective—and, through that, raising the region’s competitiveness.

We’re ~400 people, backed by Notable Capital, Coatue, Kaszek, monashees, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to provide senior individual-contributor technical leadership s 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 No
    
    SQL data modeling, event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar), REST APIs, AWS, containers (Docker/Kubernetes).
  • Frontend:
    Production React + Type Script 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 (Git Hub 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: you engage roadmaps and feasibility, not only…