About Us
Nova is a new generation payment network, poised to disrupt Visa and Mastercard, by leveraging real time payment infrastructures like Brazil's Pix & Open Finance for all daily transactions.
The company empowers consumers to pay anything, any way they like, in any installment number, regardless of what payment options are available at checkout.
It's building a layer on top of Pix & Open Finance to improve last-mile payment functionalities such as financing (credit and installments), fraud protection (chargebacks and insurance) and friction (tap to pay for consumers, high auth rates for merchants).
Nova was founded at the end of 2023 by an elite team of fintech veterans. It just raised a Series A with leading venture capital funds and is now expanding its team.
Key Responsibilities
We are looking for an outstanding engineer to join our team, as such you'll play a pivotal role in:
* Designing and evolving our banking infrastructure — the core systems that handle accounts, ledgers, PIX, and the rails connecting Nova to the broader financial ecosystem;
* Making the foundational technical decisions that will scale from MVP to high-volume production;
* Building and shipping the core services that handle account management, ledger operations, real-time transfers, and integrations with the Brazilian banking infrastructure;
* Leveraging AI tools and modern development practices to ship faster and with higher quality than would otherwise be possible;
* Setting the technical bar for the team, mentoring engineers, and being a force multiplier across the engineering org;
* Shaping our engineering culture, championing best practices, long-term thinking, and a bias for shipping.
This is your chance to be a protagonist at work, working on challenging projects with a meaningful impact, as part of a select team of elite engineers in a uniquely ambitious new payment network company.
Summary
As a Backend Engineer at Nova, you'll own services end-to-end — from design to production. You'll work in a microservices environment built on Go, Kafka, and GraphQL, shipping features that directly impact how money moves for our customers. We care deeply about clean code, observable systems, and engineers who take pride in what they build.
What You´ll Do
* Design, build, and maintain backend services in Go
* Contribute to our event-driven architecture using Kafka and GraphQL
* Work closely with product and other engineers to define technical solutions
* Improve system reliability, observability, and performance
* Participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents
* Contribute to architectural decisions and technical design reviews
What You´ll Bring
* 8+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems
* Proficiency in Go or strong experience with another statically-typed compiled language and a genuine interest in learning Go
* Solid understanding of distributed systems — concurrency, fault tolerance, eventual consistency
* Experience with event-driven or async communication patterns (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar)
* Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL or another relational database
* Experience with AWS and containerized environments (Docker + Kubernetes)
* Strong debugging skills and ownership mentality — you care how your service behaves in production
Nice to haves
* Experience with Temporal or other workflow orchestration tools
* Familiarity with GraphQL
* Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Pulumi, Terraform, or similar)
* Background in fintech, payments, or other regulated industries
* Experience with Domain-Driven Design or Clean Architecture patterns
Ideal Profile
Academic
* Preferred Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related fields
* Preferred Master/PhD degree in Computer Science or related fields
Professional
* Required 7+ years of experience with modern, technically advanced companies, with a meaningful portion at top-tier banking infrastructure or BaaS companies (Pismo, Stark, QI Tech, Pomelo, Celcoin, Matera, Dock, Fitbank, or equivalent)
* Required deep hands-on experience with AI-native development workflows (Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, or equivalent) and a proven ability to leverage them to ship faster and better
* Preferred experience with banking infrastructure — core banking, ledgers, PIX, accounts, or Brazilian financial rails
* Preferred experience with early-stage start-ups, specially 0 to 1 stage
* Preferred experience with fintech, specially payments in Brazil
Success Track Record
* Preferred graduated from top schools and/or with top grades
* Preferred participated and/or won in competitions, received work-related awards
* Preferred active leader in the community, has published articles, given lectures etc.
* Preferred other demonstrable proofs of ambition, intelligence and/or resilience
Soft Skills
* Required Commitment: hard working, very responsible and dependable; Can be counted on by the team, delivers all agreed work even in the face of challenges; Willing to put in the hours and make sacrifices to make it work, no matter what
* Required Resourcefulness: makes the most of available resources while balancing ideal solutions with practical constraints (e.g. time, budget etc.), has a willingness to learn and the capability to adapt to continuously changing circumstances, technologies, and priorities;
* Required Collaboration: enjoys team work, is transparent and in touch frequently with the whole team, communicates well (eloquently and swiftly) and is always willing to help; Is polite, thoughtful and kind, continuously build trust with all relevant stakeholders;
Other Requirements
* Language: Required at least Full Professional Proficiency in English
* Location: Required 3x a week (Tue, Wed and Thu) in office (Vila Madalena, São Paulo)
Compensation & Benefits
* Model: PJ
* Stock Option: Aggressive stock option grants
* Paid Vacations
* Premium Health Insurance
* Wellhub
If you're excited about building the rails of the next generation payment network alongside a small team of high-caliber engineers, we'd love to hear from you. Click "Apply" to share your resume — we read every application personally.