Staff Software Engineer - Payments Gateway

About Nu

Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 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.

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About the role

You will join the engineering group behind Nubank's Acquiring solutions, as Tap to Pay (TAP) experiences - turning phones and dedicated terminals into secure, reliable payment devices for our merchants.

As a Staff Software Engineer – Payments Platform, you will lead the design and implementation of our systems for authorization, clearing and settlement

Today we rely heavily on partners (e.g., Zoop); our strategic direction is to verticalize: building our own Payments SDKs and gateway to reduce dependency, gain end-to-end observability, and control core parts of the merchant experience.

This is a high-impact role: you will both build critical gateway components and act as a key knowledge source on payments protocols and acquiring, seeding expertise across multiple squads (TAP, Acquiring platforms) over a 3–5 year roadmap.

You’ll be responsible for

Designing and building Nubank’s payments gateway backend that processes POS and Tap to Pay transactions after they leave the terminal, acting as the core authorization and routing layer between our devices and external acquirers/partners.

Verticalizing partner-provided capabilities by developing our own Payment SDK

and gateway, reducing reliance on third parties for transaction processing and improving observability, stability and control over the end-to-end flow.

Designing architecture for constrained Payment environments, collaborating with embedded/mobile teams to account for hardware peripherals (NFC, EMV readers, printers), offline/latency-sensitive flows, and tight data-plan limits on terminals.

Acting as a technical bridge between our acquiring solutions, ensuring both surfaces share a robust, scalable core transaction processing flow while serving different form factors and partners.

Integrating with acquirers and networks , designing robust flows for authorizations, settlements and error handling, and progressively increasing our ownership of these interactions.

Leading long-term platform design (3–5 years) for acquiring and gateway, ensuring we build scalable, reusable components instead of point solutions, and that we can support new products and geographies over time.

Seeding and multiplying domain knowledge: running whiteboard sessions, design reviews and knowledge-sharing routines so that other backend engineers can learn POS/acquiring patterns and contribute effectively.

Collaborating with external experts and partners, representing Nubank in technical discussions with vendor and acquirer engineering teams, and shaping agreements and interfaces that allow our platform to scale cleanly.

We are looking for a person who has

Required

Staff-level backend engineering experience (or equivalent) designing and operating high-scale, mission-critical systems.

Strong background in payments / POS / acquiring backends, with experience in transaction processing and connectivity with acquirers and/or payment networks.

Hands-on experience with ISO 8583 (or very similar card-payment protocols) and the surrounding concepts (authorization flows, reversals, settlement, offline/queued transactions).

Experience working with or alongside POS / embedded / payments hardware teams, understanding constraints around peripherals, connectivity, offline behavior and latency.

Proven track record designing and evolving gateways or switches that connect to multiple acquirers or processors.

Ability to operate as a technical leader and knowledge-multiplier: mentoring senior engineers, running structured design sessions and defining long-term technical direction.

Strong communication skills and resilience: comfortable dealing with incidents, complex cross-team situations and external stakeholders, and able to keep discussions productive under pressure.

Proven experience with PCI DSS v4.0 compliance standards, with the ability to design architectures that ensure secure isolation of the CDE (Cardholder Data Environment) and meet payment data security requirements.

Comfort working in a hybrid model in Brazil (São Paulo or Belo Horizonte) collaborating in English and Portuguese across local and global teams.

Nice to have

Experience at companies that have internalized POS/acquiring stacks (e.g., Mercado Pago, PagBank, Stone, Infinity Pay, or similar players).

Previous work on Tap to Pay or SoftPOS solutions.

Familiarity with regulatory and compliance aspects of card-present payments in Brazil.

Location for this opportunity

Brazil – Hybrid hubs: São Pauloor Belo Horizonte (aligned with Nubank’s official office locations).

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 Benefits – Brazil (Employee, Hybrid)

Chance of earning equity at Nubank

Food / Meal Card (Vale-Refeição and/or Vale-Alimentação)

Public Transportation Commuting Benefit (Vale-Transporte)

NuCare – Psychological, Financial and Legal Assistance Program

Life Insurance

Medical Plan

Dental Plan

NuLanguage – Language Course Program

Nucleo – Our learning platform of courses

Extended Parental Leave

Daycare Allowance

Parental Consultancy

Work-from-home Allowance

Gym Partnerships

30 days of paid vacation

Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable

Join us

If you want to build the payments gateway that will power Nubank’s POS and Tap to Pay products - combining deep industry protocols, large-scale backend engineering and long-term platform design - we’d love to hear from you.

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.