Staff Engineer - Java
Why Join dLocal?
dLocal is the financial infrastructure powering global commerce in the world's fastest-growing markets. The biggest companies in the world trust us to unlock growth in 60+ countries across emerging markets—moving money where others see complexity. We don't just process payments; we are architects of payment ecosystems and partners in our customers' expansion. You'll work alongside 1,300+ teammates from 40+ nationalities and tackle global challenges from day one.
We are looking for a highly skilled Staff Engineer to join our Payments Performance team. This team is focused on optimizing payment performance across multiple dimensions: improving conversion rates, maximizing take rate, and keeping fraud and operational costs under control while ensuring compliance.
As a Staff Engineer, you will play a key role in designing and evolving the systems that power critical areas such as payment routing, fraud prevention, and anomaly detection. This includes building and scaling systems that intelligently decide which processors handle each transaction, developing real-time fraud decisioning tools based on data and machine learning models, and enabling proactive detection of anomalies across business and operational metrics.
You will work closely with cross-functional teams to design robust, scalable, and high-performance systems, ensuring they meet both current and future needs. Your expertise in system design and architecture will be essential in driving technical decisions, improving our platform, and helping the team navigate complex challenges.
This role requires a strong strategic mindset and the ability to understand the broader impact of technical decisions, as you’ll be contributing directly to the evolution of one of the most critical areas of our platform.
What will I be doing?
- Collaborate with technology leaders and the product team to understand department goals and requirements, translating them into technical solutions.
- Design, develop, and maintain high-quality Java applications and systems aligned with business objectives.
- Lead the technical architecture and design of Java-based projects, ensuring scalability, performance, and maintainability.
- Create scalable architecture systems for Java-based applications, considering future growth and evolving business needs.
- Optimize application performance by identifying and addressing areas for improvement, such as code optimization, database query optimization, and resource utilization.
- Troubleshoot design flaws and system bottlenecks to enhance application stability and performance.
- Perform validation tests to ensure the flexibility and scalability of the Java environment, making necessary adjustments as needed.
- Conduct comprehensive system performance tests to identify bottlenecks, assess system capacity, and fine-tune application performance.
- Generate and present detailed systems reports, including performance metrics, bottlenecks, and recommendations for improvements.
- Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to maintain high standards of software development, ensuring code quality, readability, and adherence to best practices.
What skills do I need?
- Bachelor’s degree in software engineering or computer science.
- Minimum of 7 years of professional experience in Java development.
- Solid experience in Java application development and software architecture.
- In-depth knowledge of object-oriented design principles and design patterns.
- Ability to write clean, efficient, and readable code.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP (desired).
- Experience with Java development frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.
- Event-driven architecture design experience.
- High-level project management skills.
- Ability to solve complex software system issues.
- Good verbal and written communication skills.
- Being a team player, enjoying working with your own team and collaborating with other teams in the organization.
- Upper-intermediate written and spoken English proficiency.
- Well-versed in the software development life cycle.
- Experience with monitoring applications in production using telemetry tooling such as Newrelic, Datadog, Grafana + Prometheus, Dynatrace, CloudWatch, distributed logs like ELK, etc.
Besides the tailored benefits we have for each country, dLocal will help you thrive and go that extra mile by offering you:
- Flexibility in how you work: We focus on impact and productivity over fixed hours. This means our teams have flexible schedules and, depending on your role and location, you will combine self‑managed focus time with moments of in‑person connection in our collaboration hubs.
- Fintech industry: work in a dynamic and ever-evolving environment, with plenty to build and boost your creativity.
- Referral bonus program: our internal talents are the best recruiters - refer someone ideal for a role and get rewarded.
- Work From Anywhere: Team members can work while traveling for up to 3 months every year.
Skills
As published by lever · 15 questions · 8 written answers
Basics
Which location are you applying for?, Resume/CV, Full name, Email, Phone, Current location, Current company, LinkedIn URL
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- Your salary expectations are:
- How did you get to know/hear about us? optional
- Are you legally authorised to work in your location?
- If we decide to progress your application, do you consent to the use of AI tools to generate transcripts during the interviews? If you choose not to consent, it won’t affect your performance in the selection process. If you choose to consent, the consent provided remains valid until you choose to withdraw it by sending an email to [email protected]
- As we’re a global company, English is our working language, so parts of the process will be conducted in it. Are you comfortable with that? optional
- Are you available to work in a hybrid model, attending the office 2 days per week in one of the listed locations?
- Are you very familiar with concepts as Unit of Work and Circuit Breaker? optional
Written answers (8)
- Desired salary - Gross (before taxes) salary in local currency
- Do you have experience with AI tools and/or automation? If yes, please briefly describe which tools you have used and how you applied them in your work.
- How do you currently use AI tools in your day-to-day work? Please share specific examples of how they’ve helped you improve your productivity or the quality of your output.
- When dealing with relational databases, have you optimized queries and used indexes?
- Related to NoSql, do you have some knowledge related to sharding, partitioning and replication?
- What is the most challenging scalability problem you have tackled?
- Tell us about a project where you had to make trade-offs between shipping speed and shipping the perfect solution. What compromises did you make, and how did you ensure the final product still met users needs?
- Describe a specific project that you’re proud of where you had an impact across the stack. What made this project particularly meaningful or challenging for you as a Senior Software Engineer?