Backend Engineer/API, Payments and Risk

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 User Auth Experience (UAX) team makes authentication and account security at Stripe world-class—secure by default, frictionless for legitimate users, and resilient against evolving threats. We own the end-to-end login, registration, and session management experience for the Stripe Dashboard, and we're expanding that security foundation to every surface where users and agents interact with Stripe. We improve security, access, and usability simultaneously—without compromising any of the three. Our scope spans account takeover prevention, API key security, auth for AI agents, and a two-party approvals framework governing both human and automated actions. The team sits within OAP (Organizations and Auth Platform) in the DEeP (Developer Experience and Product Platform Engineering) organization at Stripe. WHAT YOU’LL DO As a Staff Engineer on UAX, you'll set technical direction across multiple areas of the team's charter, drive architecture decisions that affect millions of users, and lead initiatives that span multiple organizations. You'll operate at the intersection of security and product—designing systems where the safe path is the default path, and navigating the tension between stronger security and lower user friction. You'll own the technical vision for one or more of our platform bets—extending our risk-scoring framework from login to API-layer anomaly detection, evolving our step-up challenge platform to serve multiple Stripe surfaces, or defining Stripe auth primitives for the agentic era (agent principals, approval rules, MCP human-in-the-loop). These are multi-year arcs that require someone who can hold the long-term architecture while shipping incrementally. You'll also directly build risk-dynamic enforcement pipelines, full-stack approval flows, API key protection UX, and the analytics infrastructure that measures our impact. This is a hands-on role with architectural leverage—you'll write code, review designs, and shape how partner teams integrate with our security primitives RESPONSIBILITIES * Own the technical architecture for a major area of the team's charter  * Design and ship systems that serve multiple Stripe surfaces—building generalized primitives, not point solutions  * Drive cross-org technical alignment on shared security infrastructure  * Make effective tradeoffs that consider security posture, user friction, and sustainable technical foundations  * Mentor and grow engineers on the team  * Raise the bar for design rigor, operational excellence, and code quality  * Shape the team's multi-year roadmap through technical foresight and principled prioritization 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 experience in full-time software development roles * Experience as a technical lead by guiding your team, influencing its roadmap, and overseeing complex projects spanning multiple teams * Experience in both frontend and backend, with strong ability to work as a generalist across the stack * Thrive in a collaborative environment with other teams to identify high-impact ways of solving problems * Excellent oral and written communication PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * You strive for simple solutions and designs over complex ones, and have a good intuition for what will last and scale well  * Deep expertise in authentication and authorization systems—SSO, MFA, passkeys and WebAuthn, OAuth, session management, or API key security * Experience building risk-based or adaptive security systems (anomaly detection, step-up auth, fraud prevention) * Strong understanding of IAM concepts, including RBAC, identity governance, SCIM, delegated auth, or approval workflows * Experience defining auth or security primitives for programmatic consumers (APIs, agents, and SDKs)—not just human-facing UI * Experience building scalable, resilient, and observable systems while understanding UX best practices for the frontend * You put yourself in the shoes of your users to understand their needs and fit that into the bigger picture * You stitch together many different services and processes, even if you haven't worked with them before * Experience building software for fellow developers

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 Before Stripe, every growing internet platform had a payments team. Today, every growing internet platform has an Identity team. Identity verification has become core economic infrastructure for online businesses — enabling them to digitally verify their users' identities for fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and trust and safety purposes. At Stripe, we're building something more ambitious than a verification product. Our vision is to build the world's most trusted store of verified identities — a single, global, reusable, risk-scored representation of every individual who interacts with Stripe and beyond. This Identity Store becomes a platform with compounding network effects: more verifications enrich the store; a richer store produces better fraud signals; better signals mean lower friction for trusted users; lower friction drives more adoption. Our product today serves millions of verifications per month for customers like OpenAI, Shopify, and WhatNot, and powers identity verification across multiple internal Stripe products including Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto. The problems ahead — adversarial AI and deepfake defense, networked identity infrastructure, progressive verification platforms, and low friction KYC APIs — sit at the frontier of what's possible in identity engineering. This role is open to candidates based in our Seattle, New York, or San Francisco offices, or remote within the US. For Stripes who live within 35 miles of an office, we offer a hybrid work environment with an expectation of in-office presence 50% of your working days each month. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Full Stack Staff Engineer on the Identity team, you will own the technical direction of one of Stripe's most strategically important product areas. This is not a role defined by task execution — it's a role defined by technical judgment, architectural influence, and the ability to turn an ambitious vision into a reliable, scalable system. RESPONSIBILITIES * Own technical strategy — Define the architecture for Identity's core systems (Identity Store, headless verification platform, fraud detection infrastructure), make build vs. buy vs. partner decisions, and surface technical risks before they become customer-facing failures * Lead 0-1 platform development — Architect net-new systems including the Identity Store, Networked Identity platform, and advanced fraud detection pipeline (behavioral biometrics, deepfake discriminators, adversarial training). Drive the evolution from a hosted-UI product to a headless-API and embedded-components platform * Drive cross-functional alignment — Be the primary technical voice in roadmap and resourcing discussions. Partner with ML, product, legal, and engineering leads across Risk, Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto to ensure Identity's abstractions serve the full breadth of Stripe's product surface * Raise the technical bar — Set engineering standards across ML, backend, mobile, and front-end; lead design reviews; and mentor senior engineers on the judgment needed to operate a high-stakes, externally-facing product * Operate with ownership — Be accountable for reliability, scalability, and security of the systems you design — including the observability and alerting that catch model drift and fraud pattern shifts before customers do 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 software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience 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) * Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth * Ability to adjust conversations from high-level discussions to detailed coding * Clear and persuasive writing and in-person communication PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience with identity verification, fraud detection, or trust and safety systems — especially systems with adversarial inputs at scale * Familiarity with ML systems in production: model serving, training pipelines, observability, drift detection, and the feedback loops that keep models accurate under adversarial conditions * Experience building platform products with multiple consumer types — internal platform teams and external developers — where API backward compatibility and abstraction quality are first-class concerns * Prior experience with 0-1 product builds: you've started with a blank page and ended with a production system, and you have clear opinions about what makes that process go well or poorly * Experience across a range of software languages and frameworks; our stack includes primarily Ruby and TypeScript on the backend, Python for ML and data pipelines, with infrastructure spanning Kafka, Temporal, Protobuf, React, SQL (Spark and Trino dialects), Airflow, Bazel, Mongo, Splunk, and Prometheus * Experience navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving organization — you can make confident technical decisions with incomplete information and update gracefully when new constraints emerge

Adyen

This is Adyen Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition.  For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.   Staff Engineer - Customer Onboarding As a Staff Engineer for Onboarding, you will lead the evolution of the Adyen merchant journey into a seamless, high-velocity activation layer. You are an Applied AI Specialist who views onboarding as an Intelligent Extraction and Reasoning problem, using LLMs to interpret merchant documents and automate complex KYC/Risk mapping. You will design the architecture that turns complex regulatory and business requirements into a zero-friction activation experience for merchants.   What you'll do * Drive Activation Velocity: Lead the architecture for our global onboarding systems. You will build the logic that orchestrates the merchant lifecycle minimizing time-to-value without compromising stability. * Bridge Policy & Code: Act as the technical architect where business logic meets regulatory requirements. You will architect an onboarding concierge that uses real-time reasoning to ask only the necessary questions, proactively resolving compliance blockers through natural dialogue. * Product Strategy: Proactively shape the strategic roadmap in partnership with the Director of Engineering, other Staff Engineers, and Product teams. You will move beyond simply shipping features to deliver innovative solutions that drive merchant success and accelerated activation by proactively addressing and resolving systemic bottlenecks. * Global Standardization: Mentor engineers to drive technical standards that ensure the user journey is compliant and performant across all regions, balancing local regulatory needs with a global core architecture.   WHO YOU ARE * * * * Systems Architect: You think in terms of merchant journeys and system bottlenecks. You have a track record of building resilient, distributed systems. * Compliance-Minded: You have a deep understanding of security-by-design, specifically as it relates to KYC, identity verification, and regulated data handling. * Full-Stack Powerhouse: Deeply proficient in Java and experienced in building high-concurrency API architectures. * Applied AI Experience: You have experience (or a deep technical interest) in building production-grade interfaces powered by LLMs, including harnesses, policy enforcement, evals, RAG architectures and secure data handling. * Entrepreneurial & Autonomous: You can navigate a large, global organization to align diverse teams (Risk, Operations, Product) on a unified technical vision for onboarding. This role's annual base salary range is $235–$317k, plus RSUs. To learn more about our compensation philosophy, please click here.   Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments  Our unique approach is a product of our diverse perspectives. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures is essential in helping us maintain our momentum. Our business and technical challenges are unique, and we need as many different voices as possible to join us in solving them - voices like yours. No matter who you are or where you’re from, we welcome you to be your true self at Adyen.  Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!   What’s next? Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role. Learn more about our hiring process here. Don’t be afraid to let us know if you need more flexibility. Adyen is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. You must be work authorized in the United States without the need for new visa sponsorship. The company can support visa transfers but will not sponsor individuals for H-1B CAP applications.