Senior Systems Engineer - Kafka & Messaging Platform

About Us

Nu is one of the largest digital financial platforms in the world, with more than 127 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Guided by our mission to fight complexity and empower people, we are redefining financial services in Latin America and this is still just the beginning of the purple future we're building.

Listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NU), we combine proprietary technology, data intelligence, and an efficient operating model to deliver financial products that are simple, accessible, and human.

Our impact has been recognized by global rankings such as Time 100 Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Bank. Visit our institutional page https://international.nubank.com.br/careers/

About the role

• The Messaging team is the backbone of service-to-service communication at Nubank — designing, operating, and evolving the infrastructure that powers large-scale, event-driven workloads across multiple countries. As a Senior Engineer (IC5), you will be a key owner of the cloud infrastructure supporting Kafka and other messaging components, helping Nubank's engineers build reliable, fast, and secure distributed systems at scale.

• This role is critical to the resilience and scalability of Nubank's platform. You will bring deep AWS and SRE expertise to a team that trusts you to make infrastructure decisions end-to-end — from design through production operation. Kafka expertise is not required on day one; structured onboarding, pairing with experienced engineers, and hands-on training will get you there.

You'll be responsible for

• Designing, provisioning, and operating AWS-based infrastructure for messaging workloads — including networking, security, resilience, and cost management.

• Implementing and evolving infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD pipelines for messaging-related components such as clusters, operators, sidecars, observability tooling, and automation.

• Building and maintaining internal tools and automations that simplify topic lifecycle management, access control, and operational workflows around Kafka.

• Partnering with product and platform teams to design robust messaging architectures, handling challenges like failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, and retries.

• Participating in on-call rotations for messaging platforms, learning Kafka operations through clear runbooks and team support.

• Contributing to runbooks, RFCs, and technical documentation that raise the bar for how messaging and Kafka are operated across the company.

• Progressively taking on deeper Kafka ownership — including capacity planning, upgrades, and observability improvements — as you ramp up.

We are looking for a person who has

• Deep AWS cloud infrastructure experience, including VPC, networking, load balancing, IAM, and security groups, with a proven track record of running and operating production services (monitoring, scaling, incident response).

• A solid SRE background with hands-on experience in CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, or similar), and safe rollout/rollback practices.

• Software development skills in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Clojure, Java, Go, Python) — enough to write and review production-quality code for internal tools and services.

• End-to-end ownership of production systems, from design through ongoing operation, including monitoring, debugging, and incident handling.

• A strong drive to learn Kafka deeply and become one of the team's go-to references in this area over time (training and mentorship are provided).

Location for this opportunity

• São Paulo, Brazil

• Campinas, Brazil

• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

• Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Our Benefits

• Chance of earning equity at Nubank

• Food/ Meal Card (Vale-Refeição and/or Vale Alimentação)

• Public Transportation Commuting Benefit (Vale-Transporte)

• NuCare – Psychological, Financial and Legal Assistance Program

• Life Insurance

• Medical Plan

• Dental Plan

• NuLanguage – Language Course Program

• Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses

• Extended Parental Leave

• Daycare Allowance

• Parental Consultancy

• Work-from-home Allowance

• Gym Partnerships

• 30 days of paid vacation

• Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable

Work Model for this Role

• 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/

Explore how we build technology at Nubank:

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