Lead Systems Engineer (Traffic Management)

TL;DR

Lead Systems Engineer (Traffic Management): Driving the reliability, scalability, and security of the service mesh and traffic platform with an accent on high-performance distributed systems and cloud networking. Focus on evolving traffic policies, strengthening resilience, and implementing AI-first engineering workflows to enable rapid product shipping.

Location: Hybrid (2-3 times/week). Must be based in or be able to relocate to Durham, Miami, Palo Alto, or Washington DC, USA.

Salary (Palo Alto base): $15,360 - $23,040

Company

Nu is one of the largest digital financial platforms in the world, redefining financial services across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.

What you will do

• Lead end-to-end milestones for the traffic platform, from problem definition to rollout and monitoring.
• Take ownership of complex problems to balance reliability, performance, security, and effort.
• Design systems with failure in mind, implementing robust tests and observability to prevent incident recurrence.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to align technical plans with organizational goals.
• Adopt and advocate for AI-first workflows to automate repetitive work, investigate issues, and review code.
• Mentor other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and documentation of runbooks.

Requirements

• Experience operating large-scale, high-performance synchronous distributed systems in the cloud.
• Hands-on proficiency with Kubernetes, DNS configuration, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Pulumi or Terraform).
• Expertise in service-mesh technologies such as Istio, Linkerd, or Envoy-based solutions.
• Deep knowledge of AWS networking and compute primitives (ALB/NLB, VPC, Route 53, IAM).
• Proven track record of leading infrastructure platform projects from design to production go-live.
• Must be based in one of the specified US locations (Durham, Miami, Palo Alto, Washington DC).

Nice to have

• Experience building platform capabilities, SDKs, or shared libraries for other engineers to consume networking capabilities.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to earn equity at Nu.
• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, Vision, and Life insurance.
• 401K, Health Saving Account (HSA), and Flexible Spending Account (FSA).
• Learning and development via Nucleo platform and NuLanguage program.
• Mental health and wellness assistance through NuCare.
• Work-from-home allowance and relocation assistance package.