How to Apply to Santander Brasil

11 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 994 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Santander is a 168-million-customer, 210,000-employee universal bank headquartered in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid) with five global businesses and dominant positions in Spain, Portugal, the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Poland, and the United States.
  • Apply through the country-specific careers portal that matches the role: santander.com/en/careers links you out to SuccessFactors-powered sites for Santander UK, Santander US, Santander Brasil, Santander Mexico, and others, each with its own contracts and timelines.
  • The ATS is SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, so submit clean, single-column, PDF or DOCX CVs without tables, columns, or graphics, and front-load the keywords from the job description and the Simple, Personal, Fair behaviors framework.
  • Expect a multi-stage process: online application, third-party assessments, recruiter screen, one or two competency interviews, technical or case component for relevant roles, and a final assessment center or panel for graduates and senior hires.
  • Language matters: Spanish or Portuguese fluency is a real differentiator for Iberian and LatAm roles, and strong English is non-negotiable for global, CIB, and technology positions anywhere in the group.
  • Risk and conduct awareness is screened for in every interview; tell stories that show you have escalated issues, balanced commercial pressure with control obligations, and respected regulation as part of the job rather than a tax on it.
  • Technology candidates should highlight cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Java/Python/React, Kubernetes, Snowflake, and any experience in regulated environments, and be ready to discuss the ONE Transformation, Gravity core platform, and PagoNxt payments stack.
  • Background checks for regulated roles can take 2-4 weeks (employment, criminal, credit, and SMR/SMCR fitness in the UK), so plan your notice period accordingly and respond quickly to verification requests.
  • Santander rewards long-term thinkers: candidates who frame the role as one chapter in a multi-decade career inside the group, with a willingness to rotate across geographies and businesses, consistently progress further than transactional applicants.

About Santander Brasil

Banco Santander, S.A. is one of the largest financial institutions in the Eurozone and the dominant retail and commercial bank across Iberia and Latin America. Founded in 1857 in the port city of Santander on Spain's northern coast, the group is headquartered in Boadilla del Monte, on the western edge of Madrid, where the sprawling Ciudad Grupo Santander campus houses tens of thousands of employees in a self-contained corporate city complete with its own training university, art collection, and transit network. Today Santander serves approximately 168 million customers in more than 20 countries through roughly 210,000 employees, making it not only Spain's largest bank by market capitalization but also one of the most geographically diversified universal banks in the world. The group operates through five global businesses: Retail & Commercial Banking, Digital Consumer Bank, Corporate & Investment Banking (Santander CIB), Wealth Management & Insurance, and Payments (which houses PagoNxt, Getnet, and Ebury). Its core regional footprint spans Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Poland, the United States (where it owns Santander Bank N.A. and Santander Consumer USA), Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and a growing presence in Germany, France, the Nordics, and Switzerland through the Digital Consumer Bank. Brazil and Mexico together generate a significant share of group profit, and Santander Consumer Finance is the largest non-captive auto lender in Europe. Under executive chair Ana Botin, the great-granddaughter of founder Emilio Botin, Santander has pursued a multi-year transformation centered on a single global technology and operating model called ONE Transformation, which standardizes platforms across geographies, builds a common cloud-native core (Gravity), and migrates the group toward a single global app experience. The bank is also a major issuer of green, social, and sustainability-linked bonds, has committed to net-zero financed emissions by 2050, and reports detailed progress on financial inclusion and women in senior leadership. Culturally, Santander positions itself with the brand promise Simple, Personal, and Fair, and these three words appear in performance reviews, leadership feedback, and recruiting materials. For job seekers, this means Santander hires across a vast range of profiles: branch and contact center roles, technology and data engineers, risk and compliance specialists, investment bankers, model validators, corporate functions, and graduate trainees through programs like the Santander Graduate Programme and the Santander Brilliance internship.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Search openings on the global careers site at santander

    Search openings on the global careers site at santander.com/en/careers, then apply on the country-specific portal (e.g., Santander UK, Santander US, Santander Brasil, Santander Mexico) since each market manages its own requisitions, contracts, and local labor compliance.

  2. 2
    Create a single profile in the Santander career portal, which is built on SAP Su

    Create a single profile in the Santander career portal, which is built on SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, and upload a tailored CV in PDF format; you can apply to multiple roles with one profile, and recruiters across regions can see your application history if you opt in.

  3. 3
    Complete online assessments early in the process for graduate, internship, and m

    Complete online assessments early in the process for graduate, internship, and many analyst roles; typical Santander assessments include numerical, logical, situational judgment, and a short personality questionnaire delivered by a third-party provider, often followed by a recorded video interview with 3-5 timed questions.

  4. 4
    Expect a recruiter screening call (20-30 minutes) focused on motivation for Sant

    Expect a recruiter screening call (20-30 minutes) focused on motivation for Santander specifically, language skills, mobility, salary expectations, and a high-level walkthrough of your CV; for Iberian and LatAm roles you may be asked to switch between English and Spanish or Portuguese.

  5. 5
    Progress to one or two rounds of competency-based interviews with the hiring man

    Progress to one or two rounds of competency-based interviews with the hiring manager and a senior business stakeholder; technology and data roles add a technical assessment such as a live coding exercise, a SQL or Python case, or a system design discussion, while risk and finance roles add a written case study or model walkthrough.

  6. 6
    For graduate programs and many corporate roles, attend a final assessment center

    For graduate programs and many corporate roles, attend a final assessment center (in person at Ciudad Grupo Santander in Madrid, Milton Keynes for Santander UK, or virtually) that combines a group exercise, a business case presentation, and a panel interview with senior leaders.

  7. 7
    Receive a verbal offer from the recruiter followed by a formal written offer thr

    Receive a verbal offer from the recruiter followed by a formal written offer through the SuccessFactors portal; background checks (employment verification, criminal record, credit check for regulated roles, and SMR/Senior Managers Regime checks in the UK) typically take 2-4 weeks and must clear before your start date is confirmed.

Resume Tips for Santander Brasil

recommended

Lead with measurable impact in euros, dollars, reais, or pesos depending on the

Lead with measurable impact in euros, dollars, reais, or pesos depending on the geography you are targeting: Santander recruiters scan for portfolio sizes, AUM, loan book volumes, basis-point improvements, NPS deltas, and cost-to-income contributions, not vague descriptions of responsibilities.

recommended

Mirror the language of Simple, Personal, and Fair plus the role's posted compete

Mirror the language of Simple, Personal, and Fair plus the role's posted competencies (collaboration, customer obsession, risk awareness, digital mindset) directly in your CV summary and bullets, because the SuccessFactors keyword filter and the human reviewer both look for explicit alignment to the corporate behaviors framework.

recommended

Call out language proficiency precisely using CEFR levels (C1 Spanish, B2 Portug

Call out language proficiency precisely using CEFR levels (C1 Spanish, B2 Portuguese, native English) near the top of the CV; for any role touching Iberia, LatAm, or global functions, Spanish or Portuguese fluency is a meaningful differentiator and ambiguity (just listing 'Spanish') often gets you screened down.

recommended

For technology roles, list concrete stack experience that overlaps with Santande

For technology roles, list concrete stack experience that overlaps with Santander's stated platforms: Java, Spring Boot, Python, React, Angular, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, Kafka, and the Gravity core banking platform; mention any experience with regulated environments, SOX controls, or PCI-DSS.

recommended

For risk, finance, audit, and compliance roles, surface specific regulatory fram

For risk, finance, audit, and compliance roles, surface specific regulatory frameworks you have worked with (Basel III/IV, IFRS 9, CRR III, MiFID II, DORA, SOX, GDPR, AML/KYC, OFAC) and the model types you have built, validated, or audited (PD, LGD, EAD, IFRS 9 ECL, IRRBB, market risk VaR).

recommended

Use a clean reverse-chronological format with a one-page CV for early-career and

Use a clean reverse-chronological format with a one-page CV for early-career and a two-page CV for experienced hires; SuccessFactors parses simple Word and PDF files reliably but mangles tables, columns, text boxes, and graphics, so avoid those even if your design instinct is to use them.

recommended

Highlight international mobility, cross-border project experience, and any time

Highlight international mobility, cross-border project experience, and any time spent embedded in another Santander geography or another global bank, because the group explicitly invests in talent that can rotate across markets and lead the ONE Transformation agenda.

recommended

Include a short section on volunteering, financial inclusion, sustainability, or

Include a short section on volunteering, financial inclusion, sustainability, or scholarship work; Santander's Universia and Santander Universities programs make community impact a visible cultural value, and recruiters often reference it as a tiebreaker between otherwise similar candidates.

ATS System: SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting

Banco Santander runs its global recruiting on SAP SuccessFactors, the dominant enterprise ATS used by most of the world's largest banks and Fortune Global 500 employers. A single candidate profile carries across all Santander geographies that share the platform, so your CV, work history, and assessment results follow you between Santander UK, Santander US, Santander Brasil, Santander Mexico, and the Madrid corporate functions. SuccessFactors parses CVs into structured fields (work experience, education, skills, languages), runs keyword and competency scoring against the requisition, and routes shortlisted profiles to the local recruiter and hiring manager. Country sites operate as branded subdomains of the same backend, which is why the apply experience feels consistent even though contracts and timelines are local.

  • Submit a clean PDF or DOCX with a single column, standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills, Languages, Certifications), and no tables, text boxes, headers, footers, or graphics, because the SuccessFactors parser silently drops or scrambles content inside those elements.
  • Mirror the exact keywords from the job description in your CV and profile (job titles, technologies, regulatory frameworks, certifications) wherever they accurately describe your experience; SuccessFactors keyword matching is literal and will not infer 'Python' from 'scripting languages.'
  • Complete every field in the candidate profile, not just the CV upload: parsed CV data is often incomplete, and recruiters filter and search on the structured profile fields, so missing a Skills entry or a Language proficiency level can keep you out of search results.
  • Specify language proficiency using CEFR levels (A1-C2) or the standard Native/Fluent/Professional/Conversational scale, because SuccessFactors filters on these values and 'good Spanish' is invisible to the search.
  • Apply early in the requisition lifecycle when possible; SuccessFactors orders candidates by application date within score bands, and roles at Santander often close to new applications once a sufficient shortlist has been built, even if the posting remains visible.
  • Set up job alerts on each country portal you care about and keep your profile current, since internal recruiters frequently search the existing candidate database for new requisitions before posting externally.

Complete SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Santander interviews are professional, structured, and competency-based, but the texture varies meaningfully by geography.

In Madrid and across Iberia the conversation is relationship-led and often moves between Spanish and English depending on the seniority and global scope of the role; expect questions about your motivation for banking specifically and for Santander as a long-horizon employer, not just a current opportunity. In London (Santander UK) and at Santander US the process is more standardized around the STAR framework, and questions map directly to a published list of behavioral competencies such as Collaboration, Customer Obsession, Talks Straight, and Embraces Change. In Brazil and Mexico interviews are typically warmer and more conversational at the start, but candidates should still be ready for a sharp business case or technical drill in later rounds, and senior roles in LatAm almost always include a panel with a regional executive. Across all geographies, expect interviewers to probe three things repeatedly: risk awareness (how you balance commercial growth with credit, conduct, and operational risk), customer impact (how your work changes outcomes for retail, SME, or corporate clients), and cultural fit to Simple, Personal, and Fair. For technology, data, and engineering roles the interview loop usually includes a live technical exercise, a system design discussion grounded in a banking scenario such as instant payments or fraud detection, and a behavioral panel evaluating how you would operate in a heavily regulated, multi-country delivery model. Investment banking and markets interviews at Santander CIB follow a more traditional bulge-bracket pattern with technical finance questions (DCF, LBO, comparable companies, accounting), market awareness, and fit, often spread across two or three rounds. Graduate and internship candidates should prepare for assessment centers that include a group case, a written analysis, and a presentation to senior leaders; assessors are watching how you treat teammates under pressure as carefully as the quality of your answer. Dress code skews business formal in Madrid, London, and CIB roles globally, and business casual in technology hubs and consumer banking offices. A small but consistent piece of feedback from candidates is that Santander interviewers value humility, long-term thinking, and a clear personal story over slick self-promotion: be specific, own your mistakes, and explain what you learned from them.

What Santander Brasil Looks For

  • Demonstrable alignment with Simple, Personal, and Fair: candidates who can describe concrete moments where they simplified a process, treated a customer or colleague as an individual, or made a fair call under pressure consistently outperform those who recite the slogan abstractly.
  • Risk and conduct awareness embedded in how you talk about your own work, including times you escalated an issue, declined a deal, fixed a control gap, or pushed back on a stakeholder; Santander is a globally systemically important bank and hires for people who instinctively think about second-order consequences.
  • Customer obsession backed by evidence: NPS movement, complaint reduction, product adoption, churn improvement, or qualitative customer stories you can tell in detail, not generic claims of being 'customer-focused.'
  • Digital and data fluency across all functions, not just technology: comfort with dashboards, basic SQL, experimentation, and AI-assisted workflows is increasingly an expectation for commercial, risk, marketing, and HR roles as the group consolidates onto Gravity and One App.
  • Multi-country collaboration skills: ability to work across time zones with teams in Madrid, London, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Boston, Warsaw, and Bangalore, and to navigate matrix reporting between a country CEO and a global business or function head.
  • Language capability matched to the role: native or near-native Spanish for most Madrid corporate roles, Portuguese for Brazil leadership, and strong written and spoken English for any global, CIB, or technology role regardless of location.
  • Long-term commitment and growth mindset: Santander invests heavily in internal mobility, the Santander Open Academy, and leadership programs, and it favors candidates who frame this role as one chapter in a multi-year career inside the group rather than a 12-month stop.
  • Ethical judgment and regulatory respect: clean record on conduct matters, ability to discuss ethical dilemmas thoughtfully, and a working understanding of why banks are regulated and what that obligation looks like day to day.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does Banco Santander use, and what does that mean for my application?
Santander runs its global recruiting on SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, the same platform used by many large financial institutions. Practically, that means you create one candidate profile that follows you across roles and geographies, your CV is parsed by an automated keyword and structure scanner before a human ever sees it, and the system favors clean reverse-chronological PDFs without tables, columns, headers, footers, text boxes, or images. Optimize for the parser by using standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills, Languages), spelling out acronyms on first use, and including the exact keywords from the job posting verbatim where they accurately describe your experience.
Should I apply through santander.com or through a country-specific site like Santander UK or Santander Brasil?
Apply through the country-specific portal that owns the requisition. The global santander.com/en/careers page is essentially a router that points you to local SuccessFactors instances, because each market hires under its own legal entity, employment contracts, and labor regulations. If a role is listed in multiple countries, choose the location where you are eligible to work and where you actually want to be based; applying to the same role in three countries does not increase your chances and can confuse local recruiters.
How important is Spanish or Portuguese for getting hired at Santander?
It depends entirely on the role and location. For most positions based in Madrid corporate functions, Iberian retail, or Latin American markets, working-level Spanish (B2 or above) is effectively required, and Portuguese is essential for Brazil leadership roles. For global technology, Santander CIB, Santander UK, Santander US, and Digital Consumer Bank positions in non-Iberian markets, English alone is usually sufficient, though Spanish is a meaningful differentiator for any role that interacts with the Madrid-based group functions or executive committee.
What is the Santander Graduate Programme and how do I get in?
The Santander Graduate Programme is a multi-year rotational scheme (commonly 18-36 months depending on the country and stream) that places early-career hires across business, technology, risk, finance, and operations rotations, often with at least one international placement. The application opens in autumn for most geographies, requires online assessments, a video interview, and an assessment center, and is highly competitive: typical acceptance rates are in the low single digits. Strong candidates show academic excellence, leadership in extracurriculars, language skills, international experience, and a clear, specific reason for choosing Santander over other global banks.
What kinds of technology roles does Santander hire for, and what stack do they use?
Santander hires across the full technology spectrum: software engineers, site reliability engineers, data engineers, machine learning engineers, cloud architects, cybersecurity specialists, product managers, designers, and engineering leaders. The published stack centers on Java with Spring Boot, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript with React and Angular, Kubernetes and containers, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kafka for streaming, Snowflake and BigQuery for analytics, and the proprietary Gravity core banking platform that the group is rolling out as part of ONE Transformation. PagoNxt, Getnet, and Ebury operate more like fintechs inside the group with their own modern stacks and faster release cadence.
How long does the Santander hiring process usually take from application to offer?
For most experienced-hire commercial and corporate roles, plan on 4-8 weeks from application to verbal offer, with another 2-4 weeks for background checks before your start date is confirmed. Technology hiring can move faster, sometimes 3-5 weeks for in-demand engineering profiles. Graduate programs run on a fixed annual calendar (apply in autumn, assessment centers in winter, offers in spring, start in late summer or early autumn). Senior leadership and regulated SMR/SMCR roles in the UK can take 3-6 months due to fit-and-proper checks and regulatory approval.
What is the dress code and office culture like at Santander?
Dress code is business formal in Madrid corporate offices, Santander CIB globally, and most client-facing senior roles, and business casual in technology hubs, retail back-office sites, and many country offices. Ciudad Grupo Santander outside Madrid is a campus environment with on-site amenities including a sports complex, child care, and shuttle buses. Hybrid working is the norm in most geographies, typically two to three days a week in the office, though policies vary by country and business and are tightening in some markets. The cultural feel skews collegial, hierarchical at the top, with strong emphasis on long-term loyalty and internal promotion.
Does Santander sponsor work visas for international candidates?
Yes, but selectively and largely for senior, specialist, or hard-to-fill technology and risk roles. Each country handles its own immigration: Santander UK uses the Skilled Worker route, Santander US sponsors H-1B and L-1 transfers for qualifying positions, Spain offers EU Blue Card and highly qualified worker visas, and intra-group mobility (moving from one Santander entity to another) is the most reliable path for international careers. For graduate programs sponsorship is rare and you generally need existing right to work in the country where you apply.
What are the most common reasons strong candidates get rejected at Santander?
The most frequent reasons are: a CV that is generic and not tailored to the specific role and the Simple, Personal, Fair behaviors; weak answers on risk and conduct questions, often from candidates with strong commercial track records who have not thought carefully about the control side; lack of a credible long-term story for why Santander specifically rather than any other global bank; insufficient language capability for the role's geography; and, for technology roles, inability to translate technical experience into a regulated banking context. Many of these are recoverable by preparing more deliberately for the next round, and Santander recruiters often encourage rejected candidates to reapply for a different role.
How does Santander approach diversity, inclusion, and pay equity in hiring?
Santander has set public targets for women in senior leadership (the group has reported targets in the 30-40% range and discloses progress in its annual Responsible Banking report), publishes gender pay gap data in markets that require it, and runs structured programs for women in technology, returners, and underrepresented groups in finance. Hiring panels for senior roles are typically required to include diverse representation, and the SuccessFactors workflow supports anonymized first-pass review in some geographies. Candidates can ask the recruiter directly about pay range, parental leave, hybrid policy, and DE&I commitments; transparent answers are the norm in the UK, US, and Spain, and increasingly across LatAm.

Open Positions

Santander Brasil currently has 994 open positions.

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