Senior Systems Engineer - Traffic Management

Nubank•Palo Alto, CA

4d•$124,000 - $156,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Traffic Management team keeps Nu’s customer-facing and internal services reachable and secure. It owns the strategy and execution of the service mesh that routes and protects requests across regions and environments. The Senior Systems Engineer will drive the reliability, scalability, and security of this platform by evolving the service mesh, strengthening resilience and observability, and enabling product teams to ship quickly without compromising stability. The role delivers traffic-platform work from problem definition through rollout and follow-up, solves complex and ambiguous problems, and ensures the quality and stability of shipped solutions. It collaborates with engineering, product, and partner teams; uses AI tools and agents in daily engineering work; maintains documentation and runbooks; supports other engineers through collaboration and feedback; and participates in support and on-call routines.

Requirements

Experience operating large-scale, high-performance synchronous distributed systems in the cloud.
Hands-on experience with load balancers, reverse proxies, TLS/mTLS, and routing; use metrics, logs, and traces to debug issues, optimize performance, and improve reliability.
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes-based infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-Code tooling, including manifests, routing and deployment strategies, and DNS configuration.
Use of AI tools and agents in daily engineering work, with consistent validation of outputs and attention to quality and safety.
Experience leading infrastructure-platform projects end to end, from design to production go-live, including milestones, stakeholder coordination, risk and trade-off management, and post-rollout stabilization.
Experience with Istio or other service-mesh technologies such as Linkerd or Envoy-based solutions, or legacy stacks such as Finagle, including traffic policies, resilience features, and observability for service-to-service communication.
Production experience with AWS networking and compute primitives, including ALB/NLB, security groups, VPC, Route 53, and IAM.
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Pulumi or Terraform to design, version, and safely roll out cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure changes.
Experience building platform capabilities or shared libraries, such as abstractions, SDKs, or internal tooling, for other engineers.

Responsibilities

Deliver end-to-end traffic-platform milestones, from problem definition through rollout and follow-up, breaking complex problems into tasks and keeping progress and risks visible.
Take ownership of complex or ambiguous problems, analyze options and trade-offs, and propose pragmatic solutions that balance reliability, performance, security, and effort.
Ensure the stability and quality of shipped work by designing for failure, implementing appropriate tests and observability, responding to incidents, and driving preventive follow-ups.
Collaborate with engineers, product teams, and partner teams to understand needs, align priorities, and create technical plans and milestones connected to team goals.
Use AI tools and agents in daily work to investigate issues, write and review code, explore solutions, and automate repetitive tasks; help the squad adopt safe and effective AI workflows.
Create and maintain technical documentation and runbooks, and share knowledge through reviews, sessions, and function-level initiatives.
Support other engineers’ growth through feedback, code reviews, design discussions, pairing, and daily collaboration.
Participate in support and on-call routines, using incidents, tickets, and metrics to identify and drive medium-term platform and process improvements.