Lead Software Engineer (Cloud Network)

About Nu

Nu serves more than 140 million customers, guided by a mission to fight complexity and empower people. The company has been leading an industry transformation through innovative products and human-centered services.

Proprietary technology and data at scale power Nu’s digital platform, built to promote financial access, advancement, and transparency. Its business model thrives on customer love and lower costs, feeding a flywheel of growth and profitability.

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About the role

Every transaction at Nubank travels across a network before it reaches a customer. As we grow across countries, accounts, regions and hybrid environments, the connectivity layer underneath has to stay fast, segmented, auditable and cheap to run — while never becoming the thing that takes the platform down.

As a Lead Software Engineer on a Cloud Network platform engineering team, you set and evolve the technical direction for how Nubank connects its cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. You own problems whose scope spreads across several teams and business units, and you are expected to bring structure to ambiguity rather than wait for it to be resolved for you.

This is an IC6 role: you lead through technical depth, design authority and influence rather than direct reports. The goal you own is a cloud network platform that scales with the business, holds up under audit, and gets simpler over time instead of more complex.

You'll be responsible for

• Setting and evolving the technical direction of the cloud network platform owned by your team, aligning with Nubank's canonical approaches and contributing back to the broader technical community.

• Leading high-level and low-level design for connectivity patterns across multi-account, multi-region, multi-geo and hybrid-cloud topologies, independently making sound architectural decisions in multi-component, multi-team designs.

• Managing complex network projects and processes end to end — working independently, coordinating across subjects and stakeholders, and escalating for managerial support in a timely way rather than reactively.

• Proactively reducing long-term complexity through simplification, consolidation, deprecation and paved roads, explicitly balancing scalability, maintainability and cost, and considering both human and AI interaction with the platform.

• Owning the operational health of the network platform in your team's scope: leading complex incident response (diagnosis, coordination, resolution), driving complex postmortems, and owning the short- and long-term tech debt strategy that comes out of them.

• Promoting a culture of safe change — feature flags, gradual rollout, monitoring, fast rollback — applied to network changes, and driving simplification and cost optimization across the topology.

• Setting and enforcing quality standards for the team's automation and infrastructure code: testing practices, code review bar, reusable modules, and anticipation of quality and maintainability needs coming from business strategy.

• Defining observability for the platform — robust monitoring, controls and SLAs that surface issues proactively rather than after customer impact.

• Bringing a strong end-to-end domain understanding: tracing a business process from product through the transactional path down to the network and data layers, and understanding how network design choices propagate through it.

• Owning the network security posture of your scope, including PCI DSS or equivalent standards, segmentation, and controls that hold up under audit.

• Evaluating buy vs. build options and new products and technologies, being data-driven about stability, reliability, scalability and cost before committing to a solution.

• Mentoring IC4/IC5 engineers on the broader system landscape, design reasoning and operational practice, and raising the bar of the people around you.

• Participating in hiring as a core part of the role, contributing to function-wide taskforces and initiatives, and documenting decisions so that knowledge travels across teams, not just within yours.

We are looking for a person who has

• CCIE, CCNP or equivalent experience — you are comfortable designing, building, implementing, maintaining and troubleshooting complex, large-scale networking infrastructures.

• Solid hands-on experience in infrastructure automation and cloud computing (AWS preferred), with depth in AWS networking services — Transit Gateway, VPC design, Direct Connect, PrivateLink, Route 53, NAT/egress patterns, network firewalls — or similar technologies.

• Deep experience planning, deploying and troubleshooting network solutions at scale: IP address management, BGP and dynamic routing, firewalls, load balancers, routers and switches, and hybrid connectivity.

• Strong coding skills (python, .Net. Java, Go etc.)

• Experience leading incident response and root cause analysis for high-impact, ambiguous failures across team boundaries.

• Strong leadership: you confidently lead complex projects that carry ambiguity and require strategic thinking, with or without formal authority.

• Experienced communication: you convey complex technical messages clearly and persuasively to technical and non-technical audiences, adjusting depth and examples to the room, and you facilitate productive discussion rather than just presenting.

• Strategic acumen and long-term perspective: you connect network platform decisions to business drivers such as operational efficiency, reliability and cost, link 6–12 month initiatives to the broader organizational strategy, and anticipate cross-team impact and trade-offs.

• An analytical profile: you go after root causes and propose solutions that hold, working creatively and analytically in a continuous improvement environment.

  
  Location for this opportunity (City, Country)

• Palo Alto, United States

Our Benefits

• Opportunity of earning equity at Nu

• Medical Insurance

• Dental and Vision Insurance

• Life Insurance and AD&D

• Extended maternity and paternity leaves

• Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses

• NuLanguage - Our language learning program

• NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program

• 401K Saving Plans - Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account

• Work-from-home Allowance

• Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable

• Compensation: $184k - $230k

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/

Our recruitment process may involve the use of artificial intelligence–enabled tools, such as automated interview transcription and analysis, to support the evaluation process. Artificial intelligence is not used to make final hiring decisions; all decisions are made by human reviewers.

To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here