Senior Staff Engineer- Service Infrastructure

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

Service Infrastructure drives Stripe’s internal abstraction ecosystem to enable optimal scale, performance, and reliability for Stripe’s products. We identify and proactively remediate critical architectural limitations to enable Stripe to realize its product strategy. We provide an exceptional developer experience so that the product engineers building on top of Stripe’s infrastructure platforms can move on new features as fast as possible. We maintain Stripe’s six nines of availability despite a 60% YoY growth in scale, while ensuring efficiency and minimizing operational load.

The frameworks, SDKs, platform capabilities, async infrastructure, and tooling we build backs nearly every product at Stripe and enables the teams that build with them to ship reliable and performant services. They power Stripe’s payment, money movement, fraud detection, billing, crypto onramp, and a multitude of other products. They abstract Stripe’s complex infrastructure systems and expose easy to use, resilient, and scalable developer capabilities. They include out of the box reliability primitives that shield Stripe’s customers from incidents. They enable sustainable integration patterns for one of the world’s largest non-relational storage systems.

Service Infrastructure collaborates with nearly every engineering team in the company and are on the critical path of most key product launches and infrastructure improvements. We build developer capabilities that provide Stripe’s engineers with the most productive development experience of their careers.

What you’ll do

We’re looking for engineering leaders who can drive the technical vision of Stripe’s service infrastructure for thousands of engineers and thrive in a highly autonomous environment with many moving pieces. You’ll lead in a large organization of talented engineers where your expertise and influence will empower our teams and the business to scale effectively. You will design and deliver capabilities, abstractions, and tools that provide Stripe engineers with a world class developer experience and you will advance Stripe’s infrastructure to meet our consistently rising bar for reliability and performance. You’ll collaborate with engineers across the company to design and build large-scale capabilities, while simultaneously enhancing our internal engineering standards, tooling, and processes. Most importantly, you’ll operate with an extreme degree of user focus. You’ll work directly with engineers leaders across product and infrastructure to discover and translate business needs into engineering plans that deliver high-impact business results.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, planning, construction, and maintenance of Service Infrastructure frameworks and SDKs utilized throughout Stripe.
• Collaborate with the leadership team to identify current and future infrastructure needs across Stripe, understand specific requirements, and prioritize both short-term and long-term solutions.
• Influence and participate in company level roadmap planning and prioritization.  
• Drive the execution of projects, overseeing the entire development lifecycle from planning to delivery, while maintaining high standards of quality and timely completion.
• Facilitate technical discussions and decision-making across the broader Infrastructure organization and Stripe’s product teams. 
• Drive a culture of technical excellence, mentoring and cultivating the next generation of technical leaders at Stripe.
• Identify and fix architectural limitations that might prevent Stripe from realizing its goals. 
• Debug production issues across services and various levels of the stack.  
• Foster a collaborative and inclusive work environment, promoting innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement within our organization.

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

• 15+ years of professional experience in an infrastructure focused software development role.
• Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries (e.g. building internal or external developer products).
• A strong engineering background in distributed infrastructure and/or platform services, including one or more of the following: developer facing abstractions, productivity tooling, storage, databases, compute.
• Experience leading projects on a cross-team and company-wide scale.
• Experience scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime.
• Experience mentoring engineers at various stages in their careers.
• Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards.
• Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth
• 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
• Proficient in at least one of Stripe’s core 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 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.