Engineering Director

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’re looking for an exceptional Engineering Director to help lead and scale our engineering organization as we build the next generation of financial technology that empowers and increases the competitiveness of Latin American organizations.

This is a senior leadership role for someone who combines strong technical judgment, people leadership, platform and systems-scale thinking, and business acumen . You will lead multiple engineering teams, develop engineering leaders and IC builders, shape our technical strategy, and ensure we continue to increase our execution velocity while maintaining the reliability, security, and quality expected from a regulated fintech platform.

You will also play an important role in how we leverage AI across our products and engineering organization , helping us identify opportunities to improve customer experiences, automate complex workflows, and increase engineering productivity.

We’re looking for someone who thrives in a high-growth, fast-moving environment , is comfortable navigating ambiguity, and can move naturally between strategy, technology, people, and direct execution.

What you'll do

• Recruit, lead and scale engineering teams. Lead multiple teams building a high-performance culture based on ownership, collaboration, speed, and technical excellence.

• Develop exceptional builders. Coach and grow senior engineers while strengthening our leadership pipeline and raising the talent bar across the organization.

• Shape our engineering strategy. Partner with Product and business leaders to translate company priorities into a clear technical strategy and engineering roadmap.

• Drive execution at scale. Ensure teams consistently deliver high-impact products while balancing speed, quality, reliability, and long-term technical investments.

• Raise the technical bar. Provide leadership across architecture, scalability, reliability, security, observability, and engineering practices. You won't need to be the primary individual contributor, but you should be technically deep enough to challenge assumptions and earn the trust of senior engineers.

• Build for fintech-grade reliability. Ensure our systems meet the security, availability, data integrity, and auditability expectations of a financial technology platform.

• Be at the cutting edge of AI-native. Identify and drive opportunities to leverage AI across our products and engineering workflows. Help establish strong practices around AI evaluation, monitoring, guardrails, reliability, and responsible deployment.

• Partner across the business. Work closely with Product, Design, Data, Security, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to make thoughtful decisions and translate technical trade-offs into clear business implications.

• Build for the next stage of growth. Anticipate technical and organizational bottlenecks and evolve our architecture, processes, and team structure before they become constraints.

What we’re looking for

• 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 high-performing engineering organizations in fast-growing technology companies.

• Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud architectures, APIs, microservices, data systems, and event-driven architectures .

• Experience designing and operating high-scale, highly available systems .

• Strong understanding of modern cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, observability, and engineering best practices translated to an AI-first approach.

• Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to connect engineering decisions to customer and business outcomes.

• Demonstrated ability to attract, coach, develop, and retain exceptional engineering talent.

• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, make thoughtful trade-offs, and adapt quickly as priorities evolve.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

• Professional fluency in English .

Our current technology ecosystem includes Java/Spring Boot, React, relational and NoSQL databases, Kafka, REST APIs, AWS, Git/GitHub, and modern CI/CD tooling . You don't need to be an expert in every technology—we care more about your ability to lead teams building complex systems and make excellent technical decisions.

AI experience

You don't need to be an ML researcher, but you should understand how modern AI can be translated into reliable products and meaningful engineering leverage .

Experience with LLMs, AI-powered products, agentic systems, AI evaluation, guardrails, or AI-assisted engineering workflows is highly valuable.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, banking, cards, expense management, or financial infrastructure .

• Experience building technology in regulated environments.

• Experience scaling engineering organizations through periods of rapid growth.

• Experience building or operating AI/ML-enabled products or platforms .

• Experience with fraud, risk, credit, decisioning, or automation systems.

• Spanish and/or Portuguese proficiency.

Why this role matters

Engineering is at the core of how we build and scale our business.

As Engineering Director, you will have the opportunity to shape not only our technology, but also how our engineering organization operates, how we develop our people, and how we use AI to build better products and move faster .

This is an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the next stage of our growth and help build the technology and engineering organization that will take us there.

Where we work

This is a hybrid role: you'll split your time between the office, customers and home. We don't set a minimum number of office days for most roles — you'll spend time in the office naturally, and most days during your ramp-up or when your leader asks.

Why Clara

• A high talent-density team driven to make an impact in Latin America — low ego, high ownership.

• Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.

• An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.

• English is our working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.

How we work

• Clarity — Open and direct communication: we say what we mean and give context where it matters.

• Simplicity — If it can be simpler, it should be.

• Ownership — We own everything we do, end to end. When something needs to happen, we don't wait.

• Pride — We hold ourselves to a high standard, and it shows in what we deliver.

• ABC (Always Be Changing) — We adapt fast, embrace change, and keep learning.

• Inclusivity — Diverse ideas, stories and perspectives build a better Clara.

If you meet the must-haves, apply — the nice-to-haves are a bonus, not a requirement.