Lead Machine Learning Engineer / Applied AI Scientist

<h3>About Us</h3> <p>Nu was born in 2013 with the mission to fight complexity to empower people in their daily lives by reinventing financial services. We are one of the world’s largest digital banking platforms, serving millions of customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.</p> <h3>About the role</h3> <p>At AI Core, we are scaling the impact of our AI initiatives to become the primary driver of Nubank’s most critical decision systems. We are seeking an <strong>Lead Machine Learning Engineer (Applied AI Scientist)</strong> to lead high-impact research projects that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art AI and production-grade financial systems. You will be responsible for solving complex, ambiguous problems using Deep Learning and Foundation Models, ensuring our architectures are scalable, efficient, and driving measurable business results.</p> <p>As an Applied AI Scientist (MLE), you’re expected to:</p> <ol> <li>Research Execution & Technical Leadership (Complexity & Autonomy)</li> </ol> <ul> <li><strong>Lead and execute complex applied research initiatives</strong> independently, focusing on building and optimizing architectures (e.g., Transformers, GNNs) that can be deployed across critical use cases like Credit, RecSys, GenAI, and real-time inference.</li> <li><strong>Address difficult and ambiguous modeling problems</strong> that require coordination across various stakeholders (Data, Infra, Product), delivering innovative solutions with a clear focus on medium-term impact.</li> <li><strong>Bridge the gap between research and production</strong> by designing architectures that respect MLOps constraints, ensuring models are optimized for latency, interpretability, and cost-efficiency.</li> </ul> <ol> <li>Strategic Impact & Collaboratio