Head of Engineering (Cloud & Platform)

Job Description

Come Make an Impact on Millions of Brazilians!

At RecargaPay, we’re on a mission to deliver the best payment experience for Brazilian consumers and small businesses — by building a powerful digital ecosystem where the banked and unbanked connect, and where consumers and merchants have a one-stop shop for all their financial needs.

We serve over 10 million users and process more than USD 4 billion annually. We’ve been profitable since 2022 and operate our own credit business. We are an AI-first, 100% remote team, scaling in the rapidly changing Brazilian financial market.

Our goal? Deliver the best payment experience in Brazil for people and small businesses alike.

We value autonomy, ownership, and a bias for action. We’re looking for people who are curious, hands-on, and driven by impact — who want to solve real problems, work with strong teams, and rethink what’s possible.

If you’re ready to do your best work, at scale, with purpose — this is your place.

As the Head of Cloud & Platform, you will own the evolution, reliability, and efficiency of the company’s entire cloud and platform ecosystem. Your mission is to build and scale a world-class cloud and developer platform that empowers engineering teams to deliver securely, reliably, and cost-efficiently on AWS.

You will lead multiple squads covering Cloud Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, SRE, DevSecOps, and FinOps, driving modernization, automation, and standardization across environments. Strategically, you will define the roadmap that aligns platform capabilities with business goals and compliance requirements, while tactically ensuring operational excellence, resilience, and scalability.

This role blends strategic leadership and technical depth, guiding senior engineering leaders, establishing architectural standards, championing reliability and cost efficiency, and partnering with Product, Security, and Compliance to ensure the platform supports rapid innovation in a regulated fintech context.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the Cloud and Platform strategy, ensuring alignment with corporate objectives, regulatory frameworks, and cost-efficiency goals.
• Lead a multi-disciplinary organization covering Cloud Infrastructure, SRE, Platform Engineering, and DevSecOps, fostering collaboration and shared accountability for uptime, security, and performance.
• Drive modernization of infrastructure and delivery pipelines, enabling a unified, automated, and compliant cloud environment.
• Partner with executive leadership to define scalable operating models, balancing autonomy for product squads with standardized guardrails and golden paths.
• Establish a long-term architectural vision for cloud services, platform frameworks, and developer enablement tools.
• Sponsor AI-assisted engineering adoption to enhance developer productivity, reduce toil, and accelerate delivery (e.g., Copilot, Cursor, LLM-based agents).
• Serve as the ultimate technical and strategic authority for AWS, Kubernetes, IaC, Observability, and Reliability practices across the organization.
• Oversee the design, scalability, and governance of the AWS multi-account organization, enforcing security, compliance, and cost policies (Control Tower, SCPs, Service Catalog).
• Lead the definition and implementation of multi-region, multi-environment architectures ensuring reliability, latency optimization, and disaster recovery readiness (RPO/RTO).
• Institutionalize well-architected principles (Security, Reliability, Performance, Cost, Sustainability) and drive continuous improvement programs based on regular audits.
• Evolve network and connectivity architectures (VPC, Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, Global Accelerator) to meet scaling, compliance, and availability goals.
• Own identity, access, and secrets management lifecycle (IAM least privilege, mTLS, KMS/HSM key rotation, Vault integration).
• Oversee monitoring and observability frameworks, implementing standards, and unified dashboards across all services.
• Ensure SLO-driven operations, with well-defined SLIs, error budgets, and automated incident management loops.
• Lead resilience and reliability engineering practices, including chaos engineering, failover drills, dependency fallback design, and proactive degradation handling.
• Build and scale the company’s Internal Developer Platform (IDP), empowering teams with self-service capabilities for environment provisioning, deployments, and observability.
• Define golden paths, opinionated tooling, and reusable infrastructure modules, enabling consistent, secure, and fast software delivery across squads.
• Ensure trunk-based development, progressive delivery (canary, blue/green), automated rollback, and health/SLO-gated deployments are embedded into CI/CD flows.
• Drive GitOps adoption to achieve deterministic deployments, auditability, and drift detection.
• Expand event-driven and streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka), defining keying, partitioning, and schema evolution strategies to support scalability and data integrity.
• Partner with Security and Compliance to embed DevSecOps and Policy-as-Code practices into CI/CD and Kubernetes admission controllers.
• Establish and lead a FinOps program, optimizing compute, storage, and data transfer costs while ensuring transparency through chargeback/showback models.
• Define cost-to-serve models per service and implement automated guardrails for budgeting and right-sizing.
• Integrate cost and performance telemetry into platform dashboards to drive data-informed decision-making.
• Partner with Finance to align cloud spend forecasts and track savings initiatives tied to architecture decisions.
• Lead and mentor senior engineering managers and principal engineers, building high-performance, high-accountability teams.
• Promote a culture of reliability, automation, and continuous improvement through transparent metrics and post-incident learning loops.
• Establish governance rhythms such as architecture councils, platform guilds, and reliability reviews to align technical direction and eliminate systemic friction.
• Collaborate closely with Risk, Compliance, and Security to uphold standards like PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO27001, LGPD, and GDPR within cloud and platform operations.

Requirements

• Academic background oriented toward Computer Science, Engineering, or Software Development disciplines.
• Deep expertise in AWS cloud architecture, including multi-account management, VPC design, EKS, ECS, Lambda, and networking topologies.
• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi) and GitOps automation at scale.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals, workload orchestration, and cost/performance optimization.
• Experience implementing SRE and reliability frameworks: SLOs, error budgets, chaos testing, and automated incident remediation.
• Mastery of observability and monitoring (CloudWatch, Grafana, Datadog, NewRelic) with trace/metric/log correlation.
• Proficiency in security and compliance engineering: IAM, KMS, encryption, secrets lifecycle, policy enforcement (OPA/Rego), and regulatory controls (PCI, LGPD, GDPR).
• Experience defining and governing API and event-driven architectures (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI, Kafka schema registries).
• Deep knowledge of progressive delivery, service mesh (e.g., Istio), and DevSecOps pipelines.
• Strong FinOps acumen: right-sizing, egress optimization, reserved instance and savings plan strategy, and service-level cost attribution.
• Experience integrating AI-assisted workflows (GitHub Copilot Enterprise, LLM-based linters and others) into development and CI pipelines, with measurable productivity impact.
• Extensive hands-on experience in software engineering roles, with solid proficiency in Java (Spring Boot) and working knowledge of Python and asynchronous programming.
• Strong foundation in Object-Oriented Programming and relational database systems.
• Solid understanding of web and mobile application architectures, including security, session management, and development best practices.
• Expertise in Domain-Driven Design and microservices architecture, with proven ability to design high-performance, scalable, and reliable distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience defining and executing architectural roadmaps aligned with business and developer-experience goals.
• Deep knowledge of networking in AWS.
• Advanced experience architecting VPC topologies, including Transit Gateway, private/public subnet design, NAT/GW cost optimization, and egress control for regulated environments.
• Hands-on experience implementing observability pipelines at scale, integrating NewRelic, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog.
• Familiarity with EKS internals: node group management, autoscaling, and Kubernetes cost/latency optimization.
• Proven experience managing multi-region and multi-environment deployments.
• Expertise in AWS security hardening and compliance controls, including IAM least-privilege modeling, KMS envelope encryption, CloudTrail auditing, GuardDuty detections, and automatic remediation with Lambda/Step Functions.
• Deep understanding of container security, image signing, ECR scanning, and OPA/Rego policy design for admission controllers.
• Advanced experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform (modules, workspaces, policy enforcement) and Pulumi (multi-language stacks, secrets providers, CI integration).
• Proven ability to implement GitOps workflows, ensuring deterministic deployments and drift detection.
• Strong policy-as-code practice to codify security/SRE guardrails across CI/CD and Kubernetes admission controllers.
• Expertise automating application stack provisioning (app resources, service accounts, IAM bindings, egress controls) through reusable IaC modules and pipelines.
• Deep understanding of progressive delivery (canary, blue/green, shadow traffic, automated rollback) and service mesh (Istio/Linkerd/App Mesh) for safe deployment strategies.
• Mastery of resilience and reliability patterns: timeouts, bounded retries with jitter, circuit breakers, bulkheads, back-pressure, outbox/saga orchestration, and graceful degradation.
• Deep knowledge of event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka and others), including partitioning strategies, compaction/retention policies, rebalancing, ordering guarantees, exactly-once semantics, and schema evolution via registries.
• Strong background in data performance engineering: caching (read-through/write-behind), connection pool tuning, pagination/cursoring, latency budgeting, and throughput modeling.
• Experience with SLO-driven reliability: defining SLIs, error budgets, and reducing alert fatigue via multi-signal correlation.
• Proficiency with production monitoring tools (NewRelic, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch) and advanced observability instrumentation.
• Proven experience building self-service developer platforms (Backstage, Internal Developer Portals) that expose golden paths for application scaffolding, environment provisioning, and secure deployments.
• Experience implementing event-driven DevEx tooling (e.g., ephemeral environments, automated CI insights, preview deployments).
• Strong knowledge of API lifecycle management and governance (OpenAPI/AsyncAPI, contract testing, versioning, idempotency, error modeling).
• Expertise in CI/CD automation and DevSecOps (GitHub Actions, CodeBuild/CodePipeline, artifact provenance, environment promotion, changelog automation).
• Practical compliance-by-design experience translating PCI-DSS, KYC/AML, GDPR, and LGPD controls into technical patterns (tokenization, segmentation, audit trails, retention/erasure).
• Experience leading AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews across all pillars (Security, Reliability, Performance, Cost, Operational Excellence, Sustainability).
• Experience designing cost-aware architectures, balancing performance, resilience, and financial efficiency.
• Exposure to edge computing and CDN optimization (Lambda@Edge, CloudFront Functions, custom caching policies).
• Fluent in English and Spanish (Portuguese a plus).

Soft Skills

• Exceptional leadership in cross-functional environments, with the ability to balance strategic vision and hands-on technical depth.
• Strong communicator able to influence C-level stakeholders and drive alignment across Product, Finance, Security, and Engineering.
• Proven ability to mentor senior technical leaders and elevate organizational maturity in reliability, cloud operations, and automation.
• High decision-making autonomy with strong prioritization and problem-solving under ambiguity.
• Strategic mindset with the ability to translate complex business goals into long-term technical direction.
• Strategic thinker with a bias for measurable outcomes, translating platform and infra excellence into business value.
• Strong decision-making and prioritization abilities under ambiguity, balancing immediate needs with long-term architectural vision.
• Active contributor to a constructive feedback culture, capable of both giving and receiving feedback to drive improvement.
• Comfort operating at both strategic and hands-on levels, flexing between system design and stakeholder engagement as needed.
• Ability to learn rapidly and adapt to new technologies in fast-paced, large-scale environments.

Industry-Specific Knowledge

You bring extensive experience leading Cloud and Platform Engineering organizations in complex, regulated, and high-growth environments, preferably within fintech or digital banking. You combine deep technical fluency with financial discipline, operational rigor, and a passion for empowering developers through secure, efficient, and scalable cloud platforms.

Benefits

• Competitive and market-aligned salary.
• Annual Award Program
• Remote work — wherever you are, you’re part of the team!
• Home office allowance through a monthly deposit in the RecargaPay app.
• Health and dental plans with no co-pay.
• Life insurance.
• Flexible meal allowance (via Flash).
• TotalPass membership to take care of your health.
• Language classes.

Diversity & Inclusion at RecargaPay

At RecargaPay, you’ll have the freedom to be who you are because we believe that diverse perspectives and experiences make us more creative and stronger. Here, everyone is welcome to express themselves authentically. We value the richness of each journey and the multiple ways of seeing the world, without distinctions of gender, race, sexual orientation, age, religion, or any other characteristic that makes us unique.

About the Use of Your Data

By sharing your resume with us, you authorize the use of your data for analysis during the selection process and possibly for other opportunities within the RecargaPay group. You can request the update or deletion of your information at any time, in accordance with LGPD (General Data Protection Law).