Engineer

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 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.