Senior Backend Engineer (with Frontend Competency) - LATAM (Remote)

Ready to accelerate your career?

Clara is the fastest-growing company in Latin America. We've built the leading solution for companies to make and manage all their payments. We already help over 20,000 large and growing businesses operate with agility and financial clarity through locally issued corporate cards, bill pay, financing, and a powerful B2B platform built for scale.

Clara is backed by some of the most successful investors in the world, including top regional VCs like monashees, Kaszek, and Canary, and leading global funds like Notable Capital, Coatue, DST Global Partners, ICONIQ Growth, General Catalyst, Citi Ventures, SV Angel, Citius, Endeavor Catalyst, and Goldman Sachs - in addition to dozens of angel investors and local family offices. 

We’re building the financial infrastructure that powers high-performing organizations across the region. We invite you to join us if you want to be part of a fast-paced environment that will accelerate your career and support you to do some of the best work of your life alongside a passionate and committed team distributed across the Americas.

What you'll do

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join Clara's Payments Tribe — We are responsible for powering seamless, secure, and scalable financial transactions across our entire platform.

In this role, you will focus heavily on the engine under the hood. Your primary strength and passion lie in backend architecture, distributed systems, system design, and complex data orchestration. While your core focus is the backend, you possess the frontend competence required  to build clean, functional user interfaces, and ensure smooth API consumption on our client-side applications.

AI fluency is central to how we work on this team — you're expected to use it across the full development lifecycle, from design to deployment, and to reach for it whenever it makes you faster or better.

💡 In this role, you will:

• Architect Core Infrastructure: Design, build, and maintain highly secure, resilient backend services in Java/Spring Boot that interface with payment processors and local financial networks across Latin America.
• Optimize Data & Performance: Ensure high-availability and asynchronous processing of transaction financial data, keeping system latency low and success rates high.
• Bridge to the Frontend: Develop and maintain the React-based frontend applications, dashboards, and internal tooling that interact with your backend services, ensuring deep integration and clean API consumption.
• Leverage AI: Use AI tools to automate repetitive engineering workflows, accelerate delivery, and close skill gaps — from scaffolding new banking integrations to generating and reviewing code.
• Lead & Mentor: Set the technical bar through backend code reviews, robust system design reviews, and hands-on mentorship of junior and mid-level engineers.
• Own System Observability: Implement monitoring, logging, and tracing across the full stack to quickly isolate and fail-gracefully when external financial APIs experience downtime.

👤 Who you are

We're looking for an autonomous, systems-minded engineer who loves complex data flows, values strict security, and understands how to deliver clean code from database to browser.

Must haves:

• Experience: 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a heavy specialization in Backend/Systems development within a Fullstack or Distributed Systems context.
• Backend Mastery (Java / Spring Boot): Strong proficiency in Java and the Spring ecosystem. Deep understanding of relational databases, concurrency, microservices architecture, and building APIs that scale gracefully.
• Frontend Competency (React): 2+ years of practical commercial experience with React and its modern ecosystem (Hooks, state management). You don't need to be a CSS pixel-perfect designer, but you must be fully confident in building, structuring, and optimizing responsive web apps.
• API & System Integration: Proven experience designing and consuming RESTful and event-driven web services (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Testing & CI/CD: Strong practices in TDD, integration testing (JUnit, Mockito), and frontend testing, alongside automated deployment pipelines (GitHub Actions).
• AI-Native Mindset: Demonstrated use of AI tools throughout the development process (design, coding, debugging). Experience using tools like Claude, Copilot, Devin, or