We are looking for a Staff Engineer to provide senior individual-contributor technical leadership at Clara. This is an organization-level IC role: you shape architecture, raise engineering standards across pods, and multiply impact through design, code, and mentorship — not a people-manager position.

The Role

You are a builder and a technical authority beyond a single pod. You still write production code regularly, but your scope is cross-team: systems that span services, shared platforms, and hard technical bets that unlock multiple product areas.

This is a builder's role first. You are expected to ship code, lead by example in reviews and design docs, and leave clearer systems behind you — not only facilitate meetings.

What You Own

• Cross-team architecture — Drive system design for initiatives that cut across pods (APIs, data models, event flows, reliability patterns). Hold a high bar on coherence, operability, and long-term cost.
• Engineering excellence — Set and model standards for code quality, testing (TDD/BDD), observability, and secure design. Influence through RFCs, architecture reviews, and pairing — not through reporting lines.
• Technical strategy — Partner with Engineering Directors, Pod Leads, and Product on sequencing, tech debt, and platform investments. Make trade-offs explicit and documented.
• Mentorship & leveling-up — Grow Senior and Mid engineers via design reviews, deep pairing, and hiring signal. You provide strong input on technical fit; managers own career and performance outcomes.
• Incident and reliability leadership — Lead or co-lead response and remediation for high-severity incidents on systems you influence; drive durable fixes, not band-aids.
• Hands-on delivery — Author meaningful PRs. Staff at Clara is not an architecture-only title.

What You Don't Own

• 1:1s, performance ratings, compensation, or PIPs — those belong to Engineering Managers / Directors.
• Day-to-day sprint facilitation for a single pod (unless temporarily embedded); Pod Engineering Leads own pod execution rhythm.

Technical Skills

• 8+ years of professional software engineering, including substantial time as a Senior / Lead IC on complex systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one of:
  • Backend: Java (Spring / Spring Boot), microservices, scalable system design, PostgreSQL/MySQL and NoSQL data modeling, event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar), REST APIs, AWS, containers (Docker/Kubernetes).
  • Frontend: Production React + TypeScript at scale, component architecture, performance, testing (Jest, RTL, Cypress/Playwright), build/CI tooling.
• Ability to work and reason full-stack even if your depth is on one side: read the whole path from data model to API to UI.
• Proven experience designing for high availability, security, and operability in production.
• Strong testing culture (unit, integration, contract) and familiarity with CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Track record of written technical design that non-authors can challenge and execute against.

Soft Skills

• Demonstrated influence without formal authority — across teams and stakeholders.
• Clear communication of trade-offs to Product, Design, and leadership.
• Product mindset: you engage roadmaps and feasibility, not only tickets.
• Intellectual honesty: change direction when evidence demands it.
• Mentorship instincts; you leave teams stronger than you found them.
• Strong English; Spanish is a plus for LATAM collaboration.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience in financial applications, payments, or regulated LATAM markets.
• Prior Staff / Principal / Staff-equivalent title, or org-wide Tech Lead scope.
• Platform or developer-experience investments (shared libraries, internal tools, AI-assisted engineering workflows).
• Deep AWS (EKS, RDS, MSK, etc.) or security posture work (auth, supply chain).

Where we work

This is a remote-first role: you'll work from home day to day. You'll ramp up in person with the team, and come together in person for team moments, events and customer visits through the year.