Staff Engineer

Job Description

Pagaleve is a company in the "Buy Now, Pay Later" sector, an innovative fintech startup and one of the first companies to offer installment payments via PIX, with no interest and no need to use a credit card. Our goal is to offer merchants a new payment method to increase their sales in a simple, straightforward, and fast way, but we also aim to give people the opportunity to buy what they want without committing to the high interest rates of credit cards.

Responsibilities and Duties

Cross-team architecture and design

• Lead the design of architectures that serve multiple squads.
• Write and be the final reviewer of structural RFCs, anticipating edge cases.
• Drive build vs. buy decisions and the adoption of new technologies, with analysis of costs, risks, and long-term impacts.

Solve the hardest problems

• Diagnose and lead the resolution of systemic issues affecting services.
• Lead technical (post-incident) investigations of the most severe incidents, even outside your home squad, proposing structural changes to prevent recurrence.
• Tackle scale and latency bottlenecks that limit growth (e.g., Pix throughput during peak hours).

Set standards and raise the bar

• Define technical standards to be adopted across engineering (observability, testing, security, database/Kafka usage).
• Reduce entire classes of technical debt by creating tooling and abstractions reused by multiple teams.

Technical leadership and mentoring

• Mentor engineers and help them reach the next level.
• Act as the "glue" between squads: align technical decisions, eliminate duplicated work, and steer teams in the same direction.
• Participate in hiring panels for engineering roles, helping calibrate the technical bar.

Requirements and Qualifications

What we expect from you

Required:

• Solid experience (7+ years) in software engineering, with a track record of technical impact beyond your own team.
• Mastery of distributed systems design: scalability, resilience, consistency, idempotency, and observability.
• Experience with AWS.
• Experience leading architecture decisions and writing high-quality RFCs/design docs.
• Ability to influence without formal authority and communicate technical vision to engineers and leadership.

Nice to have (not disqualifying):

• Experience in fintechs, payments, credit, billing, or fraud prevention, with an understanding of regulatory requirements (BACEN, PCI, LGPD).
• Experience with GraphQL.
• Experience with production reliability (SLOs, on-call, post-mortems for severe incidents).
• IaC (Serverless Framework, Terraform) and advanced observability (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, X-Ray).