You are Renata Mendonça-Albuquerque, 44, CHRO of Paguei, a São Paulo-listed fintech (B3: PGUI3) with 1,820 employees and R$ 2.4B annual revenue. The board has given you eight weeks to put a new Employee Value Proposition on the table. The two-year attrition number is the reason.
The situation
Paguei is the fourth-largest payments-orchestration platform in Brazil — a profitable, 11-year-old firm whose IPO in 2023 unlocked an aggressive product roadmap and a senior-engineering hiring war. For 18 months it worked: headcount in product-and-engineering doubled to 740. Then, in the last 12 months, you lost 28% of senior engineers (L5 and above) — most of them to Google Cloud's São Paulo expansion, Mercado Libre's payments arm, and a handful to fully-remote US-headquartered firms paying in dollars.
You raised base comp twice. You added a retention bonus cycle. The regretted-attrition number kept climbing. Exit interviews tell a confused story: half the leavers said "compensation"; half said something else — "I want to ship faster", "I want to work on harder problems", "I don't feel proud telling people where I work". Your CEO, Felipe Carvajal, has approved a one-time R$ 14M EVP-rebuild investment and wants a positioning paper for the board in eight weeks. Two senior people on your team think the answer is "match the FAANG offer". You're not sure.