Lead Systems Engineer - Traffic Management

About the role

The Traffic Management team keeps Nubank’s customer-facing and internal services reachable and secure. It is the layer that routes and protects every service request, from mobile app entry points to service-to-service calls across all our regions and environments. This function owns the strategy and execution for our service mesh ensuring our products can scale safely as we grow and expand.

In this role, you will drive the reliability, scalability and security of this critical platform, evolving our service mesh, strengthening resilience and observability, and pushing our capabilities so that product teams can ship quickly without compromising stability.

Responsibilities

• Drive the reliability, scalability and security of the traffic platform, evolving our service mesh, strengthening resilience and observability, and pushing our capabilities so that product teams can ship quickly without compromising stability.
• Take ownership of complex and sometimes ambiguous problems, analyzing options and trade-offs, and proposing clear, pragmatic solutions that balance reliability, performance, security and effort.
• Ensure the stability and quality of what you and the team ship: design with failure in mind, put the right tests and observability in place, and react quickly to incidents, driving follow-ups that prevent them from happening again.
• Collaborate with engineers, product and partner teams to understand needs, align on priorities and turn them into clear technical plans and milestones that are connected to the team’s goals.
• Use AI and agents in an AI-first way in your routine to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solution options and automate repetitive work, helping the squad adopt safe, effective AI workflows rather than just individual usage.
• Create and maintain clear technical documentation and runbooks that help other engineers understand, use and operate the traffic platform with confidence, and share knowledge through reviews, sessions and participation in function-level initiatives.
• Help other engineers grow by giving and receiving feedback through code reviews, design discussions, pairing and day-to-day collaboration, acting as a reference for good engineering practices inside the team.
• Participate in support and on-call routines for the area, using incidents, tickets and metrics as input to suggest and drive medium-term improvements to the platform and to how we work.

Requirements

• Operated large-scale, high-performance synchronous distributed systems in the cloud, working directly with load balancers, reverse proxies, TLS/mTLS and routing, and using metrics, logs and traces to debug issues, optimize performance and improve overall reliability.
• Worked hands-on with Kubernetes-based infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-Code tooling — defining and evolving manifests, routing and deployment strategies, and managing DNS configuration — with a solid understanding of how these pieces fit together to deliver resilient traffic paths in production.
• Used AI as part of their daily engineering workflow, leveraging AI tools and agents to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solutions and automate repetitive work, while consistently validating outputs and holding quality and safety as non-negotiable standards.
• Led end-to-end infrastructure platform projects from design to production go-live, breaking work into clear milestones, coordinating across stakeholders, managing risks and trade-offs, and following through post-rollout to stabilize and evolve the solution.
• Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies such as Linkerd or Envoy-based solutions — or legacy stacks like Finagle — designing and evolving traffic policies, resilience features and observability for service-to-service communication.
• Worked with AWS networking and compute primitives (ALB/NLB, security groups, VPC, Route 53, IAM) in production environments, with an understanding of how these layers interact with application traffic.
• Hands-on experience using Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to design, version and roll out changes to cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure in a safe, repeatable way.
• Previously built platform capabilities or shared libraries for other engineers — abstractions, SDKs or internal tooling — that make it easier and safer for product teams to consume traffic and networking capabilities at scale.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 5 years of relevant experience in software development and system administration.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and containerization technologies.
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, etc.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools.
• Experience with Kubernetes and its ecosystem.
• Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio, Linkerd, or Envoy.
• Experience with AWS networking and compute primitives.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform.
• Experience with AI and machine learning tools and techniques.
• Experience with debugging and optimizing distributed systems.

Skills

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and its ecosystem.
• Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio, Linkerd, or Envoy.
• Experience with AWS networking and compute primitives.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform.
• Experience with AI and machine learning tools and techniques.
• Experience with debugging and optimizing distributed systems.

Benefits

• Opportunity of earning equity at Nu
• Medical Insurance
• Dental and Vision Insurance
• Life Insurance and AD&D
• Extended maternity and paternity leaves
• NuLanguage - Our language learning program
• NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program
• 401K Savings Plans - Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account
• Work-from-home allowance
• Relocation assistance package, if applicable.

Pay

Base salary range: $15,360 - $23,040

Schedule

Hybrid 2–3 times/week: Our hybrid work model brings us to the office at least twice a week, on strategic days designed to maximize team connection and collaboration. For more details, visit https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/