Senior Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

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
We are looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer to drive the overarching strategy, technical vision, and execution across Nu’s Quality & Developer Experience ecosystem. You will sit at the epicenter of our engineering transformation.

This role goes far beyond traditional quality assurance or testing; you will own the end-to-end (E2E) Developer Experience (DevEx) across the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). From internal developer platform tools and boundary APIs to our suite of testing mechanisms and automated code reviews, your mission will be to architect AI-native systems that drastically reduce review latency, guarantee architectural correctness, and double engineering productivity across Nu. Working alongside our most tenured engineering leaders and reporting into platform leadership, you will serve as the technical authority who brings fresh, market-leading perspectives from high-velocity environments to elevate our foundational standards.

Mission
Architect, scale, and operationalize an AI-transformed Developer Experience & Quality strategy so that:

• The "Secure and Quality Path" is the Default: Automated mechanisms, linting, and smart context-aware agents enforce strict architectural standards, eliminating code quality degradation caused by high-volume AI code generation.

• Developer Velocity Doubles (2x): The friction in review latency, pull request (PR) approvals, and continuous integration is systematically dismantled, enabling thousands of engineers to ship features safely to 140M+ customers at unprecedented speeds.

• SDLC is Re-imagined for AI: Foundational tools across code authorship, testing, boundary APIs, and PR reviews are seamlessly integrated with state-of-the-art AI frameworks, smart LLM evaluations, and context-engineering hooks.

• Automated Approval Standards are Built: Clear deterministic checks and intelligent human-in-the-loop triggers are established to achieve safe, automated PR approvals without manual bottlenecks.

Core Responsibilities

• Architect E2E Quality & DevEx Platforms: Define and evolve the multi-year vision for our developer tooling ecosystem—covering internal developer platforms, boundary APIs, test automation suites, and pull request review systems.

• Lead the AI-Driven Code Review Evolution: Architect automated review mechanisms that leverage multi-model evaluations (e.g., using specialized LLMs to audit generated code), custom IDE/GitHub plugins, and deterministic linting to accelerate PR merge times while preventing code bloat or quality degradation.

• Define Human-in-the-Loop Boundaries: Set company-wide paradigms for when code changes can be automatically approved and merged versus when human intervention or secondary AI audits are required.

• Partner & Mentor Across Engineering: Act as a force multiplier by partnering with engineers and product managers, elevating the technical bar and instilling modern, high-velocity DevEx practices.

• Balance AI Speed with System Integrity: Establish observability, defect-tracking metrics, and safety rails to ensure that rapid AI-assisted development does not introduce structural fragility into Nu's core services.

• Influence Build vs. Buy Strategy: Evaluate top-tier market tools, AI coding frameworks, and internal platforms to decide when to build bespoke internal agents or integrate emerging third-party tooling.

Key Business & Engineering Metrics You Will Influence

• Developer Productivity & Velocity

  • Achieve a 2x improvement in overall engineering productivity across Nu's engineering organization.

• PR Review Latency

  • Direct reduction in time-to-merge for pull requests across all BUs and countries.

• Code Base Health & Quality

  • Zero degradation in code quality and zero increase in system defects despite exponentially higher volumes of AI-generated code.

• Automated PR Approvals

  • Increase in the percentage of routine, low-risk code changes safely approved and merged via automated mechanisms.

• Platform Adoption & Satisfaction

  • High adoption and developer satisfaction (CSAT) across proprietary internal DevEx tools and boundary APIs

Challenges and Opportunities (What You’ll Own)

• Navigating Scale: Every change you introduce to the SDLC impacts thousands of microservices and hundreds of engineering teams delivering features to over 140 million users.

• Tackling "Code Slop" at the Root: As AI agents generate code faster than humans can read it, you will solve one of the industry's newest and hardest problems: keeping codebase quality high without slowing down the team.

• High Autonomy & Strategic Breadth: You will operate with autonomy, driving horizontal technical alignment without needing micro-oversight, helping lead our joint DevEx technical council.

Core Qualifications (What We're Looking For)

• Senior IC Leadership Track Record: backend software engineering experience, with a proven track record designing developer platforms, core infra, or DevEx systems at high scale.

• Deep DevEx & SDLC Expertise: Extensive domain depth in code review systems, test automation platforms, CI/CD pipelines, developer platforms, or static analysis tools built for massive engineering organizations.

• AI Transformation & Tooling Experience: Direct hands-on experience or deep technical familiarity with AI-assisted software development—including LLM evaluation pipelines, GitHub Copilot/agent integrations, prompt/context/graph engineering, or AI-driven code review frameworks.

• Autonomous & Opinionated Technical Leader: Demonstrable history of driving technical strategy independently, navigating ambiguity, and bringing strong, battle-tested opinions on "what good looks like" in modern software development.

• High-Velocity Culture Fit: Experience operating in fast-moving, high-bar environments (e.g., top-tier tech firms, high-growth AI/DevEx startups, or elite AI labs) where speed of execution and technical rigor are equally valued.

Work Setup

Work model

Hybrid / On-Site

Office requirement

2 days per week at the office.

Our Benefits

- Opportunity of earning equity at Nu (RSUs as a public company)
- Medical, 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
- Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account
- Work-from-home allowance
- Relocation assistance package

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