Staff Data Engineer

About the role

Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation. More than 50,000 leading and fast-growing businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the region’s fastest-growing company. We’re passionate about helping every company we work with become more effective—and, through that, raising the region’s competitiveness. We’re ~400 people, backed by Notable Capital, Coatue, Kaszek, monashees, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others.

Staff Data Engineer

We are looking for a Staff Data Engineer to be the technical backbone of our Data organization. You will be part of the team owning the architecture of our data platform and making sure our data is ready for the AI era. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role: you will spend most of your time designing and building, not managing people.

You will:

- Own the technical vision and architecture of Clara's data platform, from ingestion and storage to modeling, serving and consumption

- Design and build scalable, reliable, cost-efficient data pipelines (batch and streaming) that support analytics, machine learning and operational use cases

- Lead our AI enablement efforts: structure, document and expose data (semantic layers, curated datasets, metadata, feature stores, retrieval-ready data) so that people, models and AI agents across the company can use it safely and effectively

- Define and drive best practices in data modeling, testing, observability, CI/CD, lineage and data quality

- Partner with the Director of Data to translate business and strategic goals into technical roadmaps, and to evaluate build-vs-buy decisions

- Implement the technical foundations of our data governance strategy: access control, PII handling, auditability and compliance, which matter in a regulated fintech environment

- Advance our self-service data platform so analysts, data scientists and business teams can work autonomously

- Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Risk, Growth, Marketing and Operations to ensure data is captured correctly at the source

- Raise the technical bar of the team through code reviews, design reviews, mentoring and technical documentation, without formal people-management responsibilities

- Stretch and adapt to a dynamic and fast-paced work environment

Requirements

- 10+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering with a data focus, including significant experience building and scaling data platforms at a top-tier tech company (fintech/startup experience is a plus)

- Proven track record designing and operating production-grade data architectures (lakehouse/warehouse, ELT/ETL, orchestration, streaming) at scale

- Deep proficiency in SQL and Python; experience with distributed processing frameworks (e.g. Spark) and orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Dagster)