Founding Engineer
Clera · São Paulo · $45,000–$80,000 (stated in the posting)
About the Role
Join an early-stage fintech team as a Founding Engineer, building backend systems for financial integrations, workflow orchestration, and ledger foundations. You will work closely with company leaders and early customers to shape product direction 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 ERP systems, banks, financial documents, and files to ingest data.
Build ETL pipelines with data quality controls, validation, and reconciliation logic.
Improve observability and operations through logging, metrics, alerts, incident response, and on-call practices.
Collaborate with company leaders and customers to identify problems, prototype solutions, measure outcomes, and decide what to build or discontinue.
Apply LLMs and AI to production workflows when measurable value justifies their use.
Document architectural decisions, testing standards, and security practices.
What We're Looking For
At least 5 years of backend engineering experience delivering and owning production systems end to end.
Strong skills in relational data modeling, OLTP systems, REST API design, and consistency and availability trade-offs.
Experience building integrations with complex external APIs, including authentication, rate limits, retries, and webhooks.
Comfort working with unstructured data such as PDFs, XML, and emails, and extracting and normalizing information.
Practical cloud and DevOps experience with AWS or GCP, Docker, CI/CD, and production monitoring.
Experience with data pipelines, event-driven systems, and workflow tools; familiarity with Kafka, SQS, Temporal, Airflow, or Prefect is useful.
Fintech, B2B SaaS, ERP integrations, accounting or ledger concepts, and guarded production LLM deployments are valuable. Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities is important.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary is $45,000 to $80,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Hybrid role based in São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.