Staff Software Engineer (LatAm Only)

About the Role R2 is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) to set technical direction across the core platform. This is a hands-on, high-leverage role that operates across team boundaries to raise the engineering bar and deliver the hardest parts yourself. We're building financial infrastructure for Latin America SMBs and looking for someone who can lead technical decisions at scale across multiple services. What You'll Do

• Partner directly with the Head of Platform Engineering to shape and execute these critical, company-defining projects, translating strategy into architecture and shipped systems.
• Own product and solution architecture across multiple services and teams, not just your own surface area.
• Design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and systems (REST and/or gRPC) that are scalable, observable, and safe to operate.
• Set company-wide standards for reliability, code quality, and engineering practice — and get teams to actually adopt them.
• Drive a "you build it, you own it" culture: services shipped with the metrics, tracing, dashboards, SLOs, and alerting needed to be owned end-to-end by the team that builds them.
• Champion trunk-based development, feature flags, and safe, incremental delivery as the default way we ship.
• Lead large refactors that pay down structural debt without disrupting delivery, and mentor engineers on doing the same.
• Research and invest in tooling that makes the whole engineering org more productive (with a focus on the AI space).
• Ensure delivery of mission-critical systems under tight deadlines and push relentlessly toward a zero-bug bar.
• Think about security throughout everything you do.
• Grow the engineers around you — fostering learning, risk-taking, and accountability, and multiplying your impact through others. What We're Looking For
• 8+ years of engineering experience building API-driven services, with the appetite and ability to code on a daily basis.
• Deep expertise designing and constructing web services in REST and/or gRPC, from interface design through production operation.
• Strong track record with distributed architecture patterns, in particular microservices and monolith decomposition — you've done this at real scale, not just on a whiteboard.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing event-driven architectures.
• Experience with change data capture (CDC) — streaming changes out of operational databases (e.g., Postgres WAL / logical replication, Debezium, or equivalent) to power replication, event pipelines, and downstream analytics.
• High proficiency with observability across all three pillars — traces, metrics, and logs.
• Deep hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry for instrumentation, and with metrics systems (Prometheus and PromQL, or equivalent) for defining SLIs, dashboards, and alerting — and using that telemetry to actually drive decisions.
• Solid, demonstrable refactoring ability: you can restructure large, load-bearing codebases safely and incrementally.
• Fluent with trunk-based development, feature flags, and continuous, low-risk delivery.
• Strong proficiency in Go (required). Additional experience with Java, Python, or Rust is a plus.
• Experience designing and implementing robust production data models using databases like PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and/or Snowflake — including data lifecycle, retention, and archival concerns.
• Solid grasp of the OLTP–OLAP divide — designing transactional systems for low-latency operational workloads while feeding analytical stores (e.g. Snowflake) for reporting and analytics, and knowing where each belongs.
• Experience with containers (Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience designing and operating full-text search (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, or PostgreSQL full-text search) in production — indexing, relevance, and query performance at scale.
• Professional working proficiency in both English and Spanish (required) — you'll collaborate across teams and markets in both languages daily.
• The judgement and communication skills to influence technical direction across teams and align engineers and stakeholders around a shared plan.
• Prior experience in fintech, banking, payments, or lending — especially in regulated, high-reliability environments where correctness and auditability are non-negotiable.
• Experience building systems that move money: payments, ledgers, settlement, reconciliation, or double-entry accounting, with a healthy respect for idempotency, exactly-once semantics, and consistency guarantees.
• Familiarity with financial-grade correctness concerns — handling money without floating point, transaction integrity, immutability, and building for auditability from data.