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: every lab and project mirrors what engineers actually ship at leading fintechs in Latin America. We are looking for 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, and 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 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 LatAm (Clip, dLocal, Kushki, Ebanx, Stone, Conekta or equivalent).
- Masters Degree in Computer Science or related. (Nice to have).
- 5+ years software engineering, 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 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 LatAm 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 LatAm 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 LatAm markets (BR, MX, CO, AR)
Benefits
- Remote work modality (home office).
- Joining a dynamic and growing organization with international reach.