Engineering Director
Clara · São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
**Ready to accelerate your career?** Clara is the fastest\-growing company in Latin America. We've built the leading solution for companies to make and manage all their payments. We already help over 20,000 large and growing businesses operate with agility and financial clarity through locally issued corporate cards, bill pay, financing, and a powerful B2B platform built for scale. Clara is backed by some of the most successful investors in the world, including top regional VCs like monashees, Kaszek, and Canary, and leading global funds like Notable Capital, Coatue, DST Global Partners, ICONIQ Growth, General Catalyst, Citi Ventures, SV Angel, Citius, Endeavor Catalyst, and Goldman Sachs \- in addition to dozens of angel investors and local family offices. We're building the financial infrastructure that powers high\-performing organizations across the region. We invite you to join us if you want to be part of a fast\-paced environment that will accelerate your career and support you to do some of the best work of your life alongside a passionate and committed team distributed across the Americas. 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 custom