Senior Staff Engineer, AI Core

Department: Engineer

Location: Palo Alto

Employment Type: FullTime

About Nu

Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company has been leading an industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary technology to develop innovative products and services.

Guided by its mission to fight complexity and empower people, Nu caters to customers’ complete financial journey, promoting financial access and advancement with responsible lending and transparency. The company is powered by an efficient and scalable business model that combines low cost to serve with growing returns.

Nu’s impact has been recognized in multiple awards, including Time 100 Most Influential Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Banks.

Visit our Institutional Page

About the Role

At Nu, the AI Private Banker is our intelligent financial partner that helps millions of customers understand their finances, make confident decisions, and take action seamlessly. As a Staff Software Engineer on this team, you'll define the technical architecture that powers conversational AI, recommendation engines, and personalized financial experiences across mobile and web.

You'll own the full stack from Flutter mobile apps that reach millions of users to distributed backend systems that process real-time recommendations and conversational AI interactions. This isn't just about building features; it's about creating the engineering foundation that makes financial empowerment accessible at scale.

Here, every technical decision you make directly impacts how millions of people experience financial guidance. You'll work at the intersection of banking and frontier AI, building systems that are both innovative and reliable. Behind every product interaction, there are curious minds redefining what's possible—and you'll be one of them.

You'll be responsible for

• Lead the technical architecture and design decisions for AI Private Banker's full-stack platform, ensuring scalability and performance across mobile and backend systems.

• Build and maintain Flutter mobile applications that deliver seamless conversational AI experiences to millions of users across iOS, Android, and Web.

• Design and implement distributed backend services that power recommendation engines, conversational AI integration, and real-time personalization.

• Collaborate with product, design, and data teams to translate ambitious product goals into clear, phased technical roadmaps.

• Drive engineering best practices across the team through code reviews, technical mentorship, and architectural guidance.

• Own the technical strategy for deploying and maintaining a unified user experience across multiple platforms and markets.

• Integrate AI/ML model outputs into consumer-facing applications, ensuring real-time performance and reliability.

• Make decisive technical trade-offs that balance innovation, scalability, and operational excellence.

We are looking for a person who has

Required

• Experience as a Sr. Staff/Staff Engineer shipping complex, large-scale consumer-facing mobile applications.

• Strong track record of designing, building, and operating high-throughput, fault-tolerant backend services using microservices architecture and event-driven design.

• Proven ability to take complete technical ownership of a major product area, making informed trade-offs on architecture and implementation.

• Experience working with data systems, APIs, and pipelines necessary to power AI/ML outputs within user interfaces.

• Track record of leading technical initiatives and mentoring other engineers on architecture, performance, and operational excellence.

Nice to have

•  Experience in the FinTech or highly regulated industry.

• Familiarity with cloud-native development (AWS).

• Proficiency in one or more backend languages suitable for high-scale applications (e.g., Go, Java, Python, Clojure).

• Experience building conversational AI interfaces or recommendation systems.

• Track record of scaling mobile applications across multiple global markets

Benefits:

• Top Tier Medical Insurance

• Top Tier Dental and Vision Insurance

• 20 days off, 14 company holidays, and a great culture that emphasizes work-life balance. 

• 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

Compensation:
Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs, and benefits. Base salary: $345k+ annually.

Location for this opportunity

Palo Alto, United States

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.