Lead Systems Engineer - Traffic Management

Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company drives industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary technology to develop innovative products and services. Guided by its mission to fight complexity and empower people, Nu supports customers’ complete financial journey, promoting financial access and advancement with responsible lending and transparency. The company operates an efficient, scalable business model combining low cost to serve with growing returns. Nu’s impact has been recognized in awards such as Time 100 Most Influential Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Banks.

About The Role

The Traffic Management team ensures Nubank’s customer-facing and internal services remain reachable and secure. This team owns the strategy and execution for Nubank’s service mesh, routing and protecting every service request—from mobile app entry points to service-to-service calls across all regions and environments. In this role, you will drive the reliability, scalability, and security of this critical platform by evolving the service mesh, strengthening resilience and observability, and advancing capabilities to enable product teams to ship quickly without compromising stability.

Responsibilities

• Lead and deliver end-to-end milestones on the traffic platform, from problem definition to rollout and follow-up, breaking complex problems into clear tasks while keeping progress and risks visible for the team and key stakeholders.
• Take ownership of complex and 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 by designing with failure in mind, implementing appropriate tests and observability, and responding quickly to incidents while driving follow-ups to prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate with engineers, product, and partner teams to understand needs, align on priorities, and translate them into clear technical plans and milestones connected to the team’s goals.
• Use AI and agents in an AI-first workflow to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solution options, and automate repetitive work, helping the squad adopt safe and effective AI practices.
• Create and maintain clear technical documentation and runbooks to help other engineers understand, use, and operate the traffic platform confidently, and share knowledge through reviews, sessions, and participation in function-level initiatives.
• Support the growth of other engineers by giving and receiving feedback through code reviews, design discussions, pairing, and day-to-day collaboration, acting as a reference for good engineering practices within the team.
• Participate in support and on-call routines, using incidents, tickets, and metrics as input to drive medium-term improvements to the platform and team workflows.

Requirements

• Experience operating 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 reliability.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes-based infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-Code tooling—defining and evolving manifests, routing, deployment strategies, and managing DNS configuration—with a solid understanding of how these components deliver resilient traffic paths in production.
• Use of AI as part of daily engineering workflows, leveraging AI tools and agents to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solutions, and automate repetitive work while maintaining high standards for quality and safety.
• 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 (e.g., Linkerd, 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, understanding 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 safely and repeatably.
• Built platform capabilities or shared libraries for other engineers—such as abstractions, SDKs, or internal tooling—that simplify and secure the consumption of traffic and networking capabilities at scale.

Benefits

• Opportunity to earn equity at Nu
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Life insurance and AD&D
• Extended maternity and paternity leaves
• Nucleo – Learning platform with courses
• NuLanguage – Language learning program
• NuCare – Mental health and wellness assistance program
• 401K Savings Plans (Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account)
• Work-from-home allowance
• Relocation assistance package, if applicable

Schedule

Hybrid 2–3 times per week: This role follows Nu’s hybrid work model, requiring in-office presence at least twice a week on strategic days designed to maximize team connection and collaboration. Learn more about Nu’s hybrid work model.

Pay

Palo Alto: Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs, and benefits. Base salary range: $153,600 – $230,400.

Locations: Durham, Miami, Palo Alto, Washington DC, United States.