Staff Engineer (Anti-Fraud)

As a Staff Engineer on our Anti-Fraud Engineering team, you'll take ownership of the systems that protect millions of RecargaPay users and merchants from fraud in real time. You'll design and evolve the low-latency decisioning platform that scores transactions, enforces fraud rules, and feeds signals back to risk models — all while keeping genuine payments fast and frictionless. This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role at the intersection of backend engineering, risk, and compliance, where your technical decisions directly shape RecargaPay's loss rates and customer trust.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture of real-time fraud-decisioning services that score transactions, logins, and account changes within tight latency budgets (sub-second SLAs).
• Own the evolution of the fraud rules engine, including rule versioning and safe rollout (shadow/canary), and build tooling that lets Risk and Fraud Ops analysts test hypotheses without waiting on engineering.
• Partner with Data Science to productionize fraud-detection models — building low-latency feature pipelines and serving infrastructure that keep model inputs fresh and auditable.
• Design event-driven pipelines (Kafka) that stream transaction, device, and behavioral signals across services with strict ordering, idempotency, and exactly-once guarantees where required.
• Build the audit trail and explainability layer behind every fraud decision, so outcomes can be reconstructed and defended to regulators, card networks, and dispute teams.
• Mentor engineers across levels, championing best practices in coding, system design, and incident response within the fraud engineering chapter.
• Solve technical problems of the highest scope, complexity, and ambiguity — often with incomplete signals and real financial exposure on the line.
• Promote AI-assisted engineering practices within the squad, using tooling for code generation, automated refactoring, and technical documentation to raise team velocity.

Requirements

• Academic background oriented toward computer science, engineering, or software development disciplines.
• Track record of success in hands-on backend engineering roles, developing with Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and AWS.
• Experience designing or operating real-time decisioning, scoring, or rules-engine systems under strict latency budgets.
• Hands-on experience with fraud, risk, or trust & safety systems — e.g. transaction scoring, device fingerprinting, velocity/anomaly detection, or chargeback and dispute pipelines.
• Solid understanding of event-driven architectures and streaming data (Kafka), including ordering, idempotency, and exactly-once semantics.
• Knowledge of relational database systems, Object-Oriented Programming, and Domain-Driven Design; familiarity with microservice architecture is a plus.
• Ability to translate compliance and audit requirements (e.g. BACEN, LGPD, PCI-DSS) into resilient, explainable system design.
• Experience conducting code reviews, driving knowledge sharing, and promoting collaborative development practices.
• Proven ability to design complex distributed applications built for high performance, throughput, scalability, and reliability.
• Practical experience applying AI frameworks in development projects.
• Experience in Python is a plus.

Competencies

• Strategic thinking and problem-solving, with a proactive approach to closing technical and process gaps before they turn into losses.
• High degree of autonomy and accountability, capable of leading technical decisions with minimal supervision, even under financial and regulatory pressure.
• Proven mentorship capabilities, fostering the growth of junior and mid-level engineers.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain fraud-engineering trade-offs to both technical peers and Risk/Compliance stakeholders.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity — fraud patterns shift constantly, and "done" is a moving target.
• Demonstrated influence in shaping engineering practices and elevating team-wide technical standards.
• Alignment with company values: ownership, excellence, adaptability, and innovation.

Benefits

• Competitive and market-aligned salary.
• 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.

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).