Credit Analysis Lead - São Paulo (Hybrid)

Clara is the leading platform in Latin America for companies to execute and manage every payment operation. More than 50,000 leading and fast-growing businesses run on our corporate cards, bill pay, financing and B2B payments, and in 2025 the Financial Times named Clara the region’s fastest-growing company. We’re passionate about helping every company we work with become more effective—and, through that, raising the region’s competitiveness. We’re ~400 people, backed by Notable Capital, Coatue, Kaszek, monashees, DST Global, ICONIQ, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, among others. What you'll do We’re looking for a Credit Analysis Lead to own the credit analysis function for our B2B clients in Brazil. You’ll lead a team of credit analysts who assess companies and recommend credit lines, and you’ll be accountable for the quality, speed, and consistency of every credit decision that comes through the desk. Your ownership starts when a credit request enters the credit desk (new client, limit increase, renewal, or triggered review) and covers everything until a credit decision is issued (approve / decline / amount and terms) and later maintained (renewals, limit adjustments, periodic reviews). Other teams own the steps before and after that path — but you still own making sure the whole flow works: if something upstream delays a case or something downstream breaks the experience, it’s your problem to raise and get fixed. You’ll partner closely with Sales, Risk, Product/Data and Collections to keep the credit flow fast, the portfolio healthy and the analysis workflow scalable Lead the credit analysis team Lead, coach and develop a team of credit analysts: hiring, onboarding, training, calibration and capacity/SLA planning. Own daily desk operations: intake and triage of requests, prioritization by segment and exposure, queue management and turnaround-time SLAs. Run the credit approval cadence and act as escalation point for borderline, complex or high-exposure cases. Perform and quality-review B2B credit analysis Analyze Brazilian companies’ financial health: financial statements and cash flow (DRE, balanço, DFC), revenue and margin trends, leverage, liquidity, working capital cycle and seasonality. Read the whole economic group: parent and related entities, sócios and partners, cross-exposure and consolidated exposure. Interpret Brazilian credit bureau and public data, understanding the limits and false positives of each source. Issue or recommend credit limits and terms within a delegated authority (alçada), documenting the rationale clearly; escalate above authority. Handle review triggers: renewals, limit increases/decreases, negative news, and deterioration in related accounts. Be the voice of the front line for credit strategy Act as the closest point to real client cases: surface patterns, edge cases and segment realities back to the teams that own credit policy, scorecards and portfolio strategy. Give structured, data-backed feedback on where policy, rules or score cutoffs don’t match what the analysis actually shows — and propose concrete adjustments. Track and improve the metrics that matter for your team: approval rate, TAT, override rate and decline-reason distribution. Flag early signs of deterioration in the cases your team touches, so the owners of portfolio monitoring can act on them. Drive automation and simplification Partner with Product, Data and Engineering to automate bureau pulls, decision rules and scorecards, and to simplify the analyst workflow so the team scales without adding headcount. Continuously re-draw the line between what gets auto-approved and what an analyst must review. Build your own analyses and lightweight tools (AI-assisted coding, scripts, no-code/low-code) to take manual work out of your team’s day-to-day — you don’t need to be an engineer, but you should be able to ship something yourself. Who