Founding Engineer

About the role

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join an early-stage fintech team as a founding engineer, building backend systems for financial integrations, workflow orchestration, and foundational ledger capabilities. You will work closely with company leaders and early customers to shape product direction, prototype solutions, and establish strong engineering practices.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design, build, and operate backend services and public APIs for customers and partners.

- Develop integrations with financial systems, ERPs, banks, and document sources.

- Build data ingestion and ETL pipelines with validation, quality controls, and reconciliation.

- Establish observability and operational practices, including logs, metrics, alerts, incident response, and on-call readiness.

- Collaborate with company leaders and customers to identify problems, prototype solutions, measure impact, and decide what to build or retire.

- Use LLMs where they provide measurable value, with appropriate safeguards.

- Document architectural decisions and improve engineering standards for testing and security.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- At least 5 years of backend engineering experience delivering production systems end to end.

- Strong experience with OLTP systems, relational data modeling, REST APIs, transactional data, and consistency and availability trade-offs.

- Experience integrating complex external APIs, including authentication, rate limits, retries, and webhooks, ideally in financial or ERP systems.

- Ability to extract, validate, and normalize data from unstructured sources such as PDFs, XML, and email.

- Practical cloud and DevOps skills with AWS or GCP, Docker, CI/CD, and logging and monitoring.

- Experience with event-driven systems, data pipelines, and reconciliation; familiarity with ledgers and double-entry accounting is valuable.

- Familiarity with workflow tools such as Temporal, Airflow, or Prefect, and production LLM deployment with guardrails is a plus.

- Comfort working through ambiguity, shifting priorities, and close customer collaboration; fintech, B2B SaaS, or founding-engineer experience is beneficial.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Base salary: $45,000 to $80,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.

LOCATION

Hybrid role based in São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

See the posting on Clera's site