Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation. More than 50,000 leading and fast-growing businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the region’s fastest-growing company. We’re passionate about helping every company we work with become more effective—and, through that, raising the region’s competitiveness. We’re ~400 people, backed by Notable Capital, Coatue, Kaszek, monashees, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others.
Tech Lead — MarTech
MarTech is the team at Clara that owns user acquisition — the step right before onboarding. Our focus is bringing in the right businesses — the ones that are a real fit for Clara and go on to become active customers. We build the systems behind that — from acquisition surfaces and attribution to lead qualification — across multiple Latin American countries.
We're looking for a Tech Lead to be the senior technical voice of this team from day one. This is a hands-on Builder role, not a people-management one: career conversations and performance reviews belong to a Director, so you can stay fully focused on the technical bar. You lead by building — your PRs, architecture docs, and reviews are what the team calibrates to. You'll set the technical direction across the stack and work hand in hand with product on what's worth building and why. You'll also shape how the team works: its architecture, its standards, and its execution rhythm.
We move fast and trust our leads to own outcomes end-to-end. That means autonomy to make decisions, proactivity to surface problems before they become blockers, and the attitude to push initiatives across the finish line without waiting to be told what to do.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Owning architecture and system design for MarTech's systems, and staying hands-on writing code across backend and frontend
- Building the foundation for user acquisition — tracking and attribution, lead capture and qualification, and the integrations with our ad, CRM, and marketing platforms — so we bring in businesses that go on to activate, not just volume
- Owning the team's execution rhythm — sprint planning, standups, backlog grooming, retros — and being accountable for velocity: PR cycle time, deploy frequency, and healthy WIP
- Setting and holding engineering excellence — code review standards, test coverage, and proactive management of technical debt
- Unblocking the team day to day through code reviews, design reviews, pairing, and debugging
- Owning product specs from the technical lens — reviewing them before work starts, flagging feasibility gaps and complexity, and spotting where AI tooling can close work that would otherwise take months
- Owning system health for the services you own: security posture, data privacy, scalability, performance, and availability
- Driving cross-team problem-solving and architectural discussions with Product, Marketing, Data, and Onboarding
Who you are
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with time spent as the senior technical voice on a team (formally or informally)
- A hands-on Builder who sets the standard through your own PRs, architecture docs, and reviews
- Full-stack engineering with your strength on the backend. We work primarily in Java and Spring on the backend and React on the frontend — depth in those is a plus, but we care more about strong fundamentals and how fast you ramp than about years in any one stack
- Strong understanding of microservices architecture and event-driven systems using Kafka. Experience with acquisition systems — ad platforms, tracking and attribution, CRM, funnels and experiments — is a strong plus
- A technical product mindset. You read the roadmap, not just the sprint. You go to product conversations with proposals, not just estimates
- The most fluent AI user in the room — you model AI-native engineering day to day and actively find where AI tooling closes product gaps. At Clara, AI is part of how we work, not a side topic
- High autonomy and ownership, plus English proficiency to lead technical discussions across geographies
We've kept this list short on purpose — these are the things that actually matter. If you check most of these and the rest you'd close with curiosity and the right tools, we want to hear from you.
- A high talent-density team driven to make an impact in Latin America — low ego, high ownership.
- Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP) from day one.
- An annual learning budget and accelerated development paths.
- English is our working language, with Spanish and Portuguese every day.
- Clarity — Open and direct communication: we say what we mean and give context where it matters.
- Simplicity — If it can be simpler, it should be.
- Ownership — We own everything we do, end to end. When something needs to happen, we don't wait.
- Pride — We hold ourselves to a high standard, and it shows in what we deliver.
- ABC (Always Be Changing) — We adapt fast, embrace change, and keep learning.
- Inclusivity — Diverse ideas, stories and perspectives build a better Clara.
If you meet the must-haves, apply — the nice-to-haves are a bonus, not a requirement.
Clara San Francisco, California, USA Office
San Francisco, CA, United States
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