Engineering Director - Local Cards & Site Lead
Sao Paulo
Technology – Software Engineering: Card Payments /
Hybrid
At PPRO, our mission is to simplify access to local payment methods and our vision is to enable the sale of goods and services to anyone in the world using their preferred way to pay. We empower partners such as Ant Group, PayPal and Stripe to access new markets, connect with more customers, and accelerate their growth.
Our strength lies in our diverse global team with 50+ nationalities and 10+ international locations- all united around one goal – to deliver the best possible products and services to our partners and customers. While our company mission is to keep innovating global commerce, our internal mission is to #chooseaction, #beopen, #thinkcustomer, #gofurther and #wintogether
The Purpose:
As Engineering Director for the Card Processing Domain, you will own the end-to-end technical strategy, architecture, and execution of PPRO’s local card-rail portfolio while acting as the Engineering site lead for our São Paulo hub, including supporting teams outside of your domain. Your mission is to deliver a highly available, scheme-compliant card processing enabling PSPs and merchants to sell globally.
You’ll partner closely with Product, Security, Risk & Compliance, and Commercial teams to keep transactions flowing smoothly, safely, and profitably. Blending big-picture vision with hands-on leadership, you’ll mentor engineers, uplift delivery practices, and cultivate a culture of ownership and innovation across ~40 colleagues in Brazil and beyond.
This is your chance to be the “CTO” of a domain inside PPRO building, learning, and shipping alongside talented, diverse teams on two continents.
Mission: Build a world-class local card-processing platform that maximises approval rates, minimises fraud and cost, and gives customers seamless access to local card schemes.
What You Will Be Doing:
- Define and Lead Engineering Strategy:
- Set technical direction for card rails, ensuring low latency, high resilience, and PCI-DSS compliance.
- Architect a future-proof, cloud-native platform, event-driven services, and real-time data pipelines.
- Champion innovation across tokenisation, network-tokens, intelligent retries, and SCA orchestration.
- Deliver Engineering Excellence:
- Drive continuous delivery and “DevOps as a practice” where quality and testing is owned by every engineer.
- Embed observability and automated compliance into the SDLC, shrinking incident MTTR and audit effort.
- Lead and scale a High-Performing Team.
- Hire, coach, and retain top talent in Sao Paulo fostering autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
- Act as mentor and sponsor, helping engineers grow and fulfil their potential.
- As site lead, nurture local culture and community outreach while aligning with global standards.
- Drive Operational Excellence:
- Cut auth latency, uplift issuer approvals, and optimise interchange costs through smart routing and data insights.
- Own KPIs for uptime, latency, error rates, and cost per transaction; use metrics to guide continuous improvement.
- Ensure Security & Compliance
- Work hand-in-glove with Risk, Legal, and Partnerships to meet compliance, security and regulatory and scheme standards.
- Implement automated risk controls and adaptive fraud-mitigation pipelines.
- Collaborate with Key Stakeholders:
- Together with your Product counterpart work with Commercial and Partnerships to unlock new markets and revenue streams.
- Engage PSPs and strategic merchants to translate real-world pain points into scalable technical solutions.
What We Are Looking For:
- Proven record leading engineering teams in an API-first, high integrity environment and ideally in a payments environment, or similar regulated space.
- Comfortable switching from strategic roadmap reviews to deep-dive architecture and sessions when needed.
- Mastery of cloud-native, microservice architectures (Java, Springboot and AWS).
- Strong grounding in CI/CD, security best practice, and observability.
- Data-driven mindset; you make trade-offs explicit and optimise for impact.
- Influence without authority, aligning your team and other functions on shared outcomes.
- Fluency in English and Portuguese, clear, candid communicator across cultures.
Nice To Haves:
- Understanding of PSP economics, LatAm acquiring nuances, and global compliance drivers would be a plus.
- Hands-on experience with card scheme integrations, clearing & settlement, disputes, and PCI-DSS would be advantageous
What we offer:
Hybrid working - We offer a hybrid structure with a 3 days / week on site expectation, so you can strike the balance between office and home working. In addition to our 30-day holiday allowance, we also provide a work from abroad policy, enabling employees to work remotely for up to another 30 days per year.
Learning and Development - We offer a 3,000 BRL annual budget to support your professional growth—because investing in your development benefits us all. In addition, we provide leadership cafés, on-the-job training, and other opportunities to help you grow your skills and thrive in your role.
Insurance - Because better safe than sorry - we want our employees to benefit from various insurances including life insurance, health insurance + dental plan and travel insurance.
Meal vouchers - BRL 54/ day - Enjoy a moment of conviviality and a good and balanced meal thanks to your meal vouchers. You will also have the choice between meal allowance, supermarket voucher or both (splitting the total value in two)
Enhance Family Leave - We understand the importance of family - that's why we offer enhanced family leave to support you during key life moments.
Transportation Voucher - we will cover your costs of commute!
Gym membership - PPRO helps contribute towards the costs of your gym membership, supporting your physical fitness journey while easing the burden on your wallet
New Value (Deals & Coupon Platform) - Get attractive discounts to restaurants, stores and events
Mental Health Platform - We’ve teamed up with a top well-being platform to provide one-on-one therapy, chat therapy, therapist-led courses, guided meditations, and more.
SESC - private institution that makes available Education, Health, Culture and Recreational programs and events and provides Social Assistance to our employees and their dependents.
Our Principles:
We get things done: We are courageous; we take ownership, make decisions and get things done.
We act with trust and integrity: We listen first and challenge respectfully. We seek out and leverage diverse perspectives. We welcome and offer honest and open feedback, always assuming positive intent
We put the customer first: We are laser focused on delivering outstanding outcomes for our customers. We put the customer at the heart of what we do.
We make things better: We boldly explore new ideas and have an unwavering commitment to continuous improvement.
We work as a team: We collaborate closely and value team success over individual achievement.
