AI Research Manager - Machine Learning

The posting, as Nubank wrote it

ABOUT NU

Nu serves more than 140 million customers, guided by a mission to fight complexity and empower people. The company has been leading an industry transformation through innovative products and human-centered services.

Proprietary technology and data at scale power Nu’s digital platform, built to promote financial access, advancement, and transparency. Its business model thrives on customer love and lower costs, feeding a flywheel of growth and profitability.

Visit our Institutional Page https://www.nu.com/2026-en

ABOUT THE ROLE

As AI Research Manager, you will own the operating health and execution of Nu's ML research agenda. This is a dedicated people-management role for a small, high-talent-density team of world-class researchers, partnering closely with senior technical leads who drive the scientific direction.
The team works on a portfolio of research bets on a one-to-four-quarter horizon. This work compounds into the production capabilities Nu will depend on. Current and upcoming bets include:

• Next-generation nuFormer architectures: proprietary transformers that learn from raw transaction sequences and power key production credit decisions
• Multitask and multi-target modeling: single models serving many high-impact prediction tasks at once
• Training and inference efficiency: distillation, quantization, sparsity, and parallelism to run state-of-the-art models economically at our scale
• Causal modeling and policy optimization: moving beyond prediction to the decisions and policies those predictions should drive
• World models: open-ended models that reason about a customer's full financial life
• Recommendation systems: extending the backbone to app events, engagement, and personalization signals
• Embeddings and representation learning: semantic IDs, contrastive learning, and reusable representations used across the bank
• Real-time and continual learning: low-latency inference and models that adapt over time

Your job is to make exceptional science happen: build the conditions, focus, and operating rhythm that researchers do great work.
Location: Palo Alto, US

YOU'LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR

PEOPLE & TEAM LEADERSHIP

• Lead, mentor, and advocate for a team of world-class ML researchers, fostering an environment of psychological safety, high ambition, and rigorous scientific inquiry.
• Own the operating health of the team, including performance, career growth, hiring, and compensation cycles for elite individual contributors who often operate at staff-and-above technical depth.
• Attract and retain top-tier research talent in a competitive market, and build a reputation for the team as a place the best researchers want to be.

RESEARCH OPERATIONS & EXECUTION

• Own the operating cadence of a portfolio of two-to-three concurrent, quarter-scale research bets, from problem framing and OKRs through progress tracking and clear go/no-go decisions.
• Allocate scarce, high-value resources, most notabl

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operating in global, distributed teams and navigating the path from foundational research to scalable, production-grade systems.

WHY THIS ROLE

This is a rare chance to lead frontier AI research with a clear, compounding mission: building the intelligence layer of one of the world's largest digital banks. You'll work alongside strong ML researchers, with the data, compute, and executive backing to pursue genuinely ambitious bets, and to see those bets reach more than 130 million customers.

LOCATION

Palo Alto, United States

OUR BENEFITS

• Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs and benefits. Base salary: $324k
• Opportunity of earning equity at Nu
• Medical Insurance
• Dental and Vision Insurance
• Life Insurance and AD&D
• Extended maternity and paternity leaves
• Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses
• NuLanguage - Our language learning program
• NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program
• 401K
• Saving Plans - Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account
• Work-from-home Allowance
• Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable.

WORK MODEL FOR THIS ROLE

Hybrid 2-3 times/week: Our hybrid work model brings us to the office at least twice a week, on strategic days designed to maximize team connection and collaboration. For more details, visit https://building.nu.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/ https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/

Our recruitment process may involve the use of artificial intelligence–enabled tools, such as automated interview transcription and analysis, to support the evaluation process. Artificial intelligence is not used to make final hiring decisions; all decisions are made by human reviewers.

To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here https://script.google.com/a/macros/nubank.com.br/s/AKfycbwvrewE58oGSbRWIVv8CyCWN68GLxpPVsfYYXv-ZHg94QFsTJmi82rF1x0yt-OTs2W0DQ/exec