About this role
About Nu
Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company has been leading an industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary technology to develop innovative products and services.
Guided by its mission to fight complexity and empower people, Nu caters to customers’ complete financial journey, promoting financial access and advancement with responsible lending and transparency. The company is powered by an efficient and scalable business model that combines low cost to serve with growing returns.
Nu’s impact has been recognized in multiple awards, including Time 100 Most Influential Companies, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, and Forbes World’s Best Banks.
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About the role
As AI Research Manager, you will own the operating health and execution of Nubank's ML research agenda. This is a dedicated people-management role for a small, high-talent-density team of world-class researchers, partnering closely with senior technical leads who drive the scientific direction. The team works on a portfolio of research bets on a one-to-four-quarter horizon. This work compounds into the production capabilities Nubank will depend on. Current and upcoming bets include:
Next-generation nuFormer architectures: proprietary transformers that learn from raw transaction sequences and power key production credit decisions
Multitask and multi-target modeling: single models serving many high-impact prediction tasks at once
Training and inference efficiency: distillation, quantization, sparsity, and parallelism to run state-of-the-art models economically at our scale
Causal modeling and policy optimization: moving beyond prediction to the decisions and policies those predictions should drive
World models: open-ended models that reason about a customer's full financial life
Recommendation systems: extending the backbone to app events, engagement, and personalization signals
Embeddings and representation learning: semantic IDs, contrastive learning, and reusable representations used across the bank
Real-time and continual learning: low-latency inference and models that adapt over time
Your job is to make exceptional science happen: build the conditions, focus, and operating rhythm that researchers do great work. Location: Palo Alto, US
You'll be responsible for
People & Team Leadership
Lead, mentor, and advocate for a team of world-class ML researchers, fostering an environment of psychological safety, high ambition, and rigorous scientific inquiry.
Own the operating health of the team, including performance, career growth, hiring, and compensation cycles for elite individual contributors who often operate at staff-and-above technical depth.
Attract and retain top-tier