Engineering Director

About the role

Clara, a Latin American payment platform with more than 50,000 businesses using its corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, is looking for an Engineering Director to lead and scale its engineering organization. The role combines technical judgment, people leadership, platform thinking and business acumen, and involves leading multiple engineering teams, shaping technical strategy and driving the use of AI across products and engineering.

Key responsibilities

• Recruit, lead and scale engineering teams, building a high-performance culture based on ownership, collaboration, speed and technical excellence.
• Coach and develop senior engineers and strengthen the leadership pipeline.
• Partner with Product and business leaders to turn company priorities into a technical strategy and engineering roadmap.
• Ensure teams deliver high-impact products while balancing speed, quality, reliability and long-term technical investment.
• Provide leadership across architecture, scalability, reliability, security, observability and engineering practices; you do not need to be the primary individual contributor but should be technically deep enough to challenge assumptions.
• Ensure systems meet the security, availability, data integrity and auditability expectations of a regulated fintech platform.
• Identify and drive opportunities to use AI across products and workflows, including evaluation, monitoring, guardrails and responsible deployment.
• Work with Product, Design, Data, Security, Risk, Compliance and Operations, and anticipate technical and organizational bottlenecks.

Required profile

• 10+ years of software engineering experience and systems thinking, with significant experience building and operating complex production systems.
• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience, ideally recruiting and leading multiple teams in parallel.
• Proven experience building and scaling engineering organizations in fast-growing technology companies.
• Strong product and business judgment, and the ability to connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, coach, develop and retain engineering talent.
• Ability to operate in ambiguity, make trade-offs and adapt quickly; professional fluency in English.
• Nice to have: fintech, payments or regulated-environment experience, and Spanish and/or Portuguese.

Required skills

• Distributed systems, cloud architectures, APIs, microservices, data systems and event-driven architectures.
• High-scale, highly available systems.
• Cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, observability and engineering best practices.
• Current stack: Java/Spring Boot, React, relational and NoSQL databases, Kafka, REST APIs, AWS, Git/GitHub.
• Understanding of how modern AI can be turned into reliable products; LLMs, agentic systems, AI evaluation and guardrails are highly valued.

What we offer

• Hybrid work, with time spent in the office naturally and no minimum office days.
• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
• Annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.