Technical Referent, dLocal
Artificial Intelligence Lab
2+ days a week in office
Emerging markets payments platform
Open for applications
Emerging markets payments platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
2+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable global merchants to connect seamlessly with billions of emerging market users.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years in software engineering; 3+ years working hands-on with LLMs and AI tooling
- Strong experience with distributed systems and event-driven architectures, both synchronous and asynchronous
- Proficiency with LangChain, LangGraph or similar orchestration frameworks, including custom tools and multi-step workflows
- Solid knowledge of AWS infrastructure and how to run evaluation workloads in a secure, cost-aware way
- Track record designing and running benchmarks comparing AI models and tools under real constraints
- Able to turn ambiguous "we should try this new thing" ideas into well-scoped evaluation plans with clear hypotheses and metrics
- Comfortable making trade-off calls — quality vs. latency vs. cost vs. vendor lock-in — and documenting them clearly
- Experience writing short, opinionated decision memos that help others move fast
- Can explain technical results to non-specialists in concrete, concise terms
- Experience working with platform, product and operations teams to align evaluations with real use cases
- Able to influence without authority, aligning teams around shared standards and guardrails
- Curious and biased toward experimentation, combined with disciplined measurement and risk awareness
- Comfortable in a small, high-leverage team without embedded PMs. You structure your own work and keep stakeholders informed
- Builder attitude: you prefer reusable tools, templates and playbooks over one-off work
What the job involves
- You'll join the AI Lab, a team whose mission is to validate high-value emerging AI and automation technologies and de-risk their adoption across dLocal
- This is a rare opportunity to work at the frontier of applied AI in fintech: running rigorous experiments on the latest models and tools, and turning results into decisions that shape how a global payments company like dLocal adopts AI
- As Technical Referent, you are the technical referent for technology scouting and evaluation within dLocal
- You will run instrumented spikes and benchmarking on emerging AI technologies, produce clear recommendations for internal teams (could be business, legal, IT, etc.) at dLocal, and coordinate hand-offs to the teams that take validated technologies into production
- You will partner closely with engineering teams responsible for taking your proof of concepts into production (either domain teams or platformization teams): covering platform infrastructure, enablement programs, IT automations, and knowledge systems
- Your core focus is evaluation and recommendation, not long-term ownership of production systems
- Run short, instrumented spikes and benchmarking on new models, tools and frameworks: LLMs, vector databases, orchestration frameworks, copilots, assistants and more
- Compare vendor and open-source options, documenting trade-offs across quality, cost, latency, security and integration complexity
- Deliver concise decision memos with clear recommendations: adopt, watch, or avoid
- Design and maintain evaluation environments (i.e. datasets, prompts, scenarios, telemetry) to test models under realistic constraints
- Build automation and tooling to measure quality, robustness, latency and cost, including regression tracking over time
- Ensure every evaluated technology has benchmark coverage and a documented risk and limitations view
- For promising technologies, produce readiness playbooks describing recommended patterns, guardrails and integration guidelines
- Coordinate with platformization teams to turn validated technologies into platformized capabilities
- Track which validated items progress to platformization or pilots, and capture learnings to sharpen future bets
- Work with Security, Legal, Compliance and other AI teams to document risk assessments, mitigations and governance recommendations for each evaluated technology
- Maintain checklists, decision templates and lightweight standards reusable across evaluations and by partner teams
- Incorporate learnings from third-party AI tooling already in use (e.g., external copilots, AWS AI suite) into adoption guidelines
- Partner with other AI teams and domain teams to ensure clear boundaries and smooth collaboration
- Participate in hiring as a technical evaluator and culture champion
- Mentor engineers in the Lab and adjacent teams on evaluation methods, benchmarking and experimental design
- Share knowledge through internal write-ups, tech talks and occasional external meetups and conferences
Application process
- Our Talent Acquisition team is invested in creating the best candidate experience possible, so don’t worry, you will definitely hear from us. We will review your CV and keep you posted by email at every step of the process!
Our take
It is clearly evident that there is a massive payments gap between developed countries and emerging economies, with consumers in many countries having little or no access to modern payment options. dLocal was established in Uruguay to address this gap, which it aims to close not only for its neighbouring countries but across the globe.
Through its unique "One dLocal" concept (one direct API, one platform, and one contract), global companies can accept payments, send pay-outs and settle funds globally without separately managing pay-in and pay-out processors. The company also supplies a defense suite and local issuing for virtual and physical pre-paid cards in Latin America, as well as tools for building payments infrastructure for platforms and marketplaces.
Since founding, the company has expanded across Uruguay, the USA, Israel, Brazil and Europe. The company has seen significant growth while remaining confident and committed to its original mission. A notable achievement is dLocal becoming a certified Payment Initiation Service Provider in Brazil, which means it can eliminate unnecessary steps for users in the region.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Apr 2021
$150m
LATE VC
Sep 2020
$200m
SERIES A
Total funding: $357m
Company HQ
Tres Cruces, Montevideo, Montevideo Department
Leadership
Sergio Fogel
(Co-Founder & CSO)Co-founded multiple companies, such as AstroPay, and is an Official Member of the Forbes Finance Council.
Pedro Arnt
(CEO)Member of the Board of Directors at Allegro who advises at several firms. Previously EVP and CFO at MercadoLibre.com.
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