Senior Software Engineer for FinTech Engineering Specialization (Course 1: Payments)

Jala University is launching a FinTech Engineering Specialization for mid-to-senior software engineers. The program is taught in English and built around production-grade engineering, with every lab and project mirroring what engineers actually ship at leading fintechs in Latin America. We are seeking Senior practitioners to design the content of each of the program’s four courses.

We are looking for a senior software engineer with deep, hands-on experience in payment systems to design Course 1 end-to-end. The course covers the card payment ecosystem, regional instant payment rails, ledger architecture, and regulatory compliance by design. It targets backend engineers who want to build what companies like Clip, dLocal, Kushki, Ebanx, or Mercado Pago run in production.

What students will build

Students will build a Multi-Tenant Core Ledger and Transaction API: an event-sourced, double-entry ledger backend with a secure REST/JSON API, strict idempotency, BaaS data partitioning, and concurrency controls. You will design the lab so this system grows incrementally over 10 weeks, with clear rubrics for each milestone.

Requirements

• Mandatory: Direct professional experience at a payments fintech operating in Latin America (Clip, dLocal, Kushki, Ebanx, Stone, Conekta, or equivalent).
• Master’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field (nice to have).
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years in FinTech/payments.
• Public writing samples showing technical explanation (docs, workshop material, book chapter, or open-source project known for its docs), including the ability to write to publication standard.
• Reproducibility discipline (pinned dependencies, containers, seeded runs, documented decoding parameters).
• Able to write examples, labs, and exercises in both Go and TypeScript/Node.js.
• Production mindset: You design what engineers build in real systems, not academic exercises.

Domain expertise we are looking for

• Card payments: Card transaction flows (ISO 8583 authorization, capture, reversal, settlement), the full actor chain from issuer to merchant, BIN routing, acquiring models, and interchange; familiarity with ISO 20022.
• Instant payment rails: Hands-on integration with at least one of PIX (Brazil), SPEI (Mexico), or Transferencias 3.0 (Argentina), including QR payloads, interoperability, and settlement flows.
• Ledgers & distributed systems: Multi-tenant, event-sourced, double-entry ledgers; isolation levels, locking, idempotency, transaction state machines, and preventing double-spending under high concurrency.
• Clearing & settlement: Understanding of Latin America clearing and settlement networks (e.g., SLC, CERC, Prosa, ACH, Coelsa) and BaaS/Ledger-as-a-Service integration.
• Regulation by design: Working knowledge of at least one Latin American framework (BACEN, CNBV, BCRA, SFC); settlement finality, non-repudiation, and audit trails as engineering constraints.

Nice to have

• Conceptual familiarity with stablecoin settlement for cross-border payments.
• Experience writing technical documentation: RFCs, ADRs, OpenAPI specs.
• Spanish, to produce contextual regulatory notes for specific Latin American markets (BR, MX, CO, AR).

Benefits

• Remote work modality (home office).
• Joining a dynamic and growing organization with international reach.