Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Stripe

WHO WE ARE ABOUT STRIPE Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career. ABOUT THE TEAM The API Platform team is responsible for empowering teams to build highly reliable and performant services, backing our payment systems, fraud detection, and a multitude of other products. As an infrastructure team, you will build and expand the service frameworks to make complex systems easy to use, resilient, and scalable. We build powerful interfaces for engineers that depend on these systems—deployment, load balancers, web framework, databases, Kafka, and Kubernetes—while keeping them highly available and performant. We're looking for engineering leaders who drive the technical vision of Stripe's service infrastructure platform for thousands of engineers to use and build on top of, and thrive in a highly autonomous environment with many moving pieces. WHAT YOU’LL DO You will join as a Technical Lead for one of the most impactful teams at Stripe. You will lead a team of engineers, collaborate with infrastructure and product engineering orgs, and advance service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption at Stripe. By collaborating with the team's technical leaders, you will ensure the software your team builds meets the needs of Stripe and its customers. We are a highly effective team that consistently delivers high-impact results while genuinely caring for one another. We expect you to bring your curiosity and critical thinking skills to this challenging domain. We are looking for individuals with a strong background in designing and delivering high-performance infrastructure products for both internal and external customers. We would love to hear from you whether you have spent your entire career in infrastructure or are looking to apply your skill set to the database engineering domain for the first time. RESPONSIBILITIES * Lead a team of talented engineers, providing mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success * Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps that deliver milestones toward a cohesive engineering vision * Understand user needs and pain points to prioritize engineering work and deliver high-quality solutions that meet user needs * Drive the execution of projects, overseeing the entire development lifecycle from planning to delivery, while maintaining high standards of quality and timely completion * Work with high-visibility teams and their stakeholders to support the Infrastructure's key engineering initiatives *  Provide hands-on technical leadership (architecture and design, vision, direction, and requirements setting, and incident response processes) for team members * Work with leaders across the company to create and drive toward the longer term vision of Stripe's services roadmap * Build a collaborative and inclusive work environment, promoting innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement within the team WHO YOU ARE We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS * 12+ years of technical experience * 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role * Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries (e.g., building internal or external developer products) * Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers * Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth * Ability to adjust conversations from high-level discussions to detailed coding * Thrives on a high level of autonomy and responsibility * Clear and persuasive writing and in-person communication * Strong problem-solving skills, critical thinking, determination, and a growth mindset * Ability to work effectively with a diverse group of people, genuinely caring for each other and contributing to a high level of psychological safety for all team members and partners * Proficient in at least one of the programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python, Go) PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Strong written and verbal communication skills for different audiences (leadership, users, company-wide) * Experience with a variety of common infrastructure platforms (databases, logging, event streams, metrics, caching, etc.) * Experience leading partially remote and distributed teams * Experience developing sustainable, in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering orgs * Experience building serverless platforms * Experience managing rigorous incident response processes and on-call rotations We don't expect deep expertise in every dimension above, but genuine curiosity about any of the areas that are less familiar is important to us

Stripe

WHO WE ARE ABOUT STRIPE Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world's largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone's reach while doing the most important work of your career. ABOUT THE TEAM Stripe processes over $1.9T in payments volume per year, which is roughly 1.6% of the world's GDP, for millions of customers from startups to enterprises. The tremendous amount of data makes Stripe one of the best places to do machine learning. While being an integral part of almost every product line at Stripe (e.g., Payments, Radar, Capital, Billing, etc.), we have lots of exciting opportunities to innovate in ML Platform at Stripe. The ML Platform team builds the platforms and services that enable ML engineers and data scientists across Stripe to take data and build features and models from prototype to production—reliably, at low latency, and at scale. Our scope spans ML training infrastructure, model serving and deployment, feature computation and online serving, observability and monitoring, and agentic AI capabilities. We work closely with product teams, data scientists, and platform infrastructure teams to build powerful, flexible, and user-friendly systems that substantially increase ML velocity across the company. WHAT YOU'LL DO You'll serve as a technical lead across the ML Platform space and a key contributor to the evolution of the platforms that power Stripe's ML-driven products. As a Staff Engineer, you'll make decisions with a large impact on Stripe. You'll influence our investments and strategy while making our systems more reliable, secure, and a delight to use. You'll work cross-functionally with other technical staff, data science, product, and senior leadership to increase the impact of ML at Stripe. You'll help define the long-term strategy and lead the technical direction for the next generation of ML infrastructure that powers Stripe's ML-driven products. RESPONSIBILITIES * Take ownership of end-to-end architecture and system design for large, complex projects across ML Platform. * Define technical direction for highly ambiguous projects, transforming complex user needs into long-lasting platform strategy. * Design system architectures for the most challenging ML Platform problems in one or more areas, including AI and ML workflow orchestration, scalable CPU and GPU compute infrastructure, model training, LLM fine-tuning, low-latency model inference, large-scale feature stores, real-time monitoring, and LLM and agent orchestration. * Turn high-leverage ideas into tangible, robust solutions that shape platform and product roadmap, combining technical excellence with creative problem-solving. * Scope and lead large projects with significant business impact, driving them from requirements through design, implementation, and production operation. * Work with ML engineers, data scientists, and product teams directly to translate their needs into functional requirements and scalable technical solutions. * Arbitrate critical decisions that balance competing priorities while meeting latency, reliability, cost, and security constraints. * Serve as a key engineering representative, engaging senior leaders across Stripe and advising the leadership team on key technical considerations related to the end-to-end ML lifecycle. * Drive cross-team technical initiatives that improve ML development velocity and MLOps maturity across the company. * Mentor and grow other engineers. Serve as a role model for designing, implementing, and operating great software systems. WHO YOU ARE We're looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS * 10+ years of professional software development experience, or equivalent domain expertise, with a solid background in service-oriented architecture and large-scale distributed systems. * Track record of serving as a technical lead, with the ability to provide technical direction, lead multi-team initiatives, and mentor team members. * Experience building and operating production ML platform in one or more areas such as model training, model serving, orchestration, or ML data systems, with requirements for performance, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency. * Strong product instincts and a deep understanding of the business context in which you operate. * Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. * Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally, collaborating effectively with ML engineers, data scientists, software engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders. * The ability to thrive on a high level of autonomy and responsibility, and comfort operating in ambiguous environments. * Hands-on experience using AI tools to accelerate how you work. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience building large-scale ML training, serving, or data infrastructure for machine learning use cases, such as distributed training, model inference, feature stores, real-time feature computation, and model registries. * Experience with distributed ML training systems, accelerator-backed compute, training data pipelines, experiment tracking, and model evaluation. * Experience rapidly developing prototypes and iterating based on user feedback. * Experience training and shipping machine learning models to production to solve critical business problems. * Familiarity with LLMs, LLM application frameworks, and agentic AI patterns (e.g., tool use, multi-agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation). * Familiarity with cloud services (e.g., AWS) and cloud-based AI and ML services (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock, Databricks, OpenAI). * Ability to synthesize ideas across the organization while setting a compelling technical vision. * Comfortable working with geographically distributed teams. * Passion for side projects, open source, or self-driven technical initiatives.

Stripe

WHO WE ARE ABOUT STRIPE Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world's largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone's reach while doing the most important work of your career. ABOUT THE TEAM The Stream Compute team at Stripe builds and operates the infrastructure, tooling, and systems behind our Flink-powered stream processing systems. We're at the heart of several core asynchronous workflows, operating at significant scale and handling vast amounts of sensitive financial data. Our work powers intricate processes involving various critical financial operations and real-time analytics. We run globally distributed systems with high reliability and performance to meet Stripe's scaling, availability, and product needs, and we continually reduce operational toil by investing in automation and self-service tooling for upgrades, maintenance, and day-to-day operations. The team is distributed between Seattle, Toronto, and remote locations. What makes our team truly exciting is our commitment to our users: we ensure no event is dropped, state integrity is preserved, and exactly-once processing is supported as a first-class feature. Working at the intersection of real-time data processing and fintech innovation, we continuously push the boundaries of what's possible. Our focus on innovation, user experience, reliability, and compliance drives increased ROI and operational excellence, making us a crucial part of Stripe's success. WHAT YOU'LL DO You'll help define and deliver the next generation of Stripe's Flink-first stream compute infrastructure—driving innovation to meet extremely high availability targets at global scale. Partnering with infrastructure engineers, adjacent platform teams, and the product orgs that depend on Flink every day, you'll set a long-term technical direction that scales with Stripe's growth while enabling reliable, efficient operations for years to come. You'll work on the hardest problems in operating Flink in production—state management, exactly-once processing, performance isolation, and automated recovery—so teams across Stripe can confidently build stateful stream processing applications on top of it. RESPONSIBILITIES * Design, build, and operate stream compute infrastructure with Apache Flink at the center, alongside technologies like Kafka, Temporal, and AWS services * Partner with product and platform teams across Stripe to understand requirements, unblock Flink adoption, and improve how stream processing infrastructure is used end-to-end  * Define and implement operational best practices (e.g., shuffle sharding, cellular architecture, load shedding, automated state recovery) to improve resilience and reliability at scale  * Drive fleet-level automation and standardization ("pets" to "cattle") through self-service workflows, safer rollouts, and self-healing systems that reduce manual operations  * Lead initiatives that raise the bar on Flink availability and state durability (e.g., multi-region strategies, disaster recovery readiness, operational readiness reviews, incident learning)  * Evaluate and productionize Flink ecosystem capabilities (e.g., SQL, connectors, state backends) to improve developer experience and scalability without compromising reliability  * Work closely with the open-source community to identify opportunities for adopting new open-source features and contributing back to OSS WHO YOU ARE We're looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS * This is a Staff-level role—that typically means 10+ years of experience building, operating, and evolving large-scale production systems.   * Experience as a technical lead for team(s) working on distributed systems, including scaling them in fast-moving environments * Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Flink, Spark, Kafka, Pulsar, or Pinot * Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems built with open-source tools * Experience building and scaling infrastructure as a product • Strong software engineering skills and a passion for big data distributed systems * Ability to write high-quality code (in programming languages like Go, Java, Scala, etc.) * Comfortable operating with high autonomy and ownership * Growth mindset and a willingness to learn quickly, explore ambiguous problem spaces, and dive deep when needed * Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience operating streaming infrastructure as a platform (e.g., Flink clusters, Kafka, Pulsar) for internal customers at scale * Deep hands-on experience authoring, optimizing, and operating real-time processing frameworks such as Flink, Spark Streaming, Storm, or Kafka Streams in production * Experience building or operating control planes for managing large-scale infrastructure * Open-source contributions to data processing or big data systems (Hadoop, Spark, Celeborn, Flink, etc.)