Technical Lead Systems Engineer - Kafka

Nubank•Miami, FL

22h•Hybrid

About The Position

About Us Nu is one of the largest digital financial platforms in the world, with more than 127 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Guided by our mission to fight complexity and empower people, we are redefining financial services in Latin America and this is still just the beginning of the purple future we're building. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NU), we combine proprietary technology, data intelligence, and an efficient operating model to deliver financial products that are simple, accessible, and human. Our impact has been recognized by global rankings such as Time 100 Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Bank. Visit our institutional page https://international.nubank.com.br/careers/ About the Role We are looking for a Tech Lead Systems Engineer to spearhead our Messaging Infrastructure team. In this role, you will be the technical reference for a platform that serves as the nervous system of our entire operation. You will lead the engineering efforts to maintain and evolve a high-throughput messaging environment built on Apache Kafka, processing trillions of messages and petabytes of data monthly. As a Tech Lead at the IC6 level, you will balance deep technical execution with leadership responsibilities—mentoring engineers, defining technical roadmaps, and ensuring our infrastructure scales sustainably as we expand to support hundreds of financial products across multiple countries.

Requirements

Experience in Technical Leadership: You have a proven track record of leading technical initiatives or engineering teams in high-growth environments, particularly within infrastructure or platform engineering.
Deep Mastery of Apache Kafka: You don't just use Kafka; you understand its internals and have extensive experience operating it at a massive scale (multi-cluster, multi-region) in production.
Systems Engineering Background: You have strong experience with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and performance tuning, knowing how to balance throughput, latency, and durability.
A Data-Driven Approach to Cost & Performance: You have experience implementing cost-effective solutions for large-scale infrastructure, using metrics and observability to drive architectural decisions.
Problem-Solving at Scale: You have designed and maintained mission-critical systems where reliability and containing the "blast radius" were paramount to the business's success.

Responsibilities

Technical Roadmap & Execution: You will lead the team in defining and executing the technical roadmap for our Kafka infrastructure, translating complex scalability needs into actionable engineering milestones.
Managing Scale at its Peak: Your main challenge will be ensuring high reliability and minimal latency for a system handling over 1PB of data daily across more than 200 Kafka clusters and 1,500 brokers.
Operational Strategy: You will drive strategies to support and monitor over 1 million Kafka topics efficiently, automating where others manualize to ensure we scale without linear headcount growth.
Efficiency & Sustainability: You will own the goal of optimizing resource utilization and controlling infrastructure costs across multiple AWS accounts, making sure our growth is smart and sustainable.
Platform Evolution: You will lead the design of asynchronous communication patterns that go beyond Kafka, preparing our infrastructure for the next generation of financial products and high-volume business platforms.
Engineering Excellence: You will foster a high-performance culture by mentoring senior engineers, leading deep technical discussions, and conducting design reviews that contain "blast radius" and raise the technical bar.