Staff Engineer, Usage Based Billing

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 Stripe Billing team builds software tools that accelerate the economic and technological growth of global businesses by helping them operationalize their commercial relationship with their customers. Our product offering is a robust set of building blocks that our customers combine in creative ways to support their ever-evolving business. Our Billing platform serves as the strong foundation to support different billing models, customer acquisition channels, and ways of issuing bills and collecting payments. We also offer tools such as billing and SaaS analytics and revenue retention and recovery, designed to meet the full recurring revenue management needs of startups and large enterprises alike.

What you’ll do

We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help guide Stripe’s Usage-Based Billing product to General Availability (GA). You will work alongside our high-profile users, particularly high-growth GenAI companies, to ensure our platform supports their scale.

Reaching GA requires maturing the product across several fronts including system reliability, feature completeness, and ease of adoption. You will help architect high-throughput metering systems while simultaneously evolving our API surface. A key challenge is designing interfaces that are simple to use initially but capable of supporting our users' most advanced needs. We want to offer a straightforward developer experience that gradually reveals complexity only when necessary.

Winning in this space requires solving uniquely challenging technical problems; our systems must process billions of events per month with low latency and strong consistency. Your goal is to take the insights gained from these high-volume users and translate them into a stable, scalable, and elegant core product that defines the industry standard for usage-based billing.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical initiatives to move Usage-Based Billing from a high-touch pilot phase to a robust, General Availability product. You will identify improvements that influence core product stability.
• Embed with engineering teams at major AI companies to build high-leverage capabilities. You will solve their immediate scaling issues and translate those fixes into long-term product features.
• Design high-throughput ingestion systems for high cardinality data. The backend must handle the massive usage spikes common in GenAI models.
• Develop customization frameworks and public APIs. As we scale, interfaces must remain usable for developers building complex financial workflows.
• Translate ambiguous user needs into technical solutions. You will provide feedback to core product teams to shape the future of Stripe’s Revenue & Financial Automation offerings.
• Mentor senior engineers and improve engineering standards and tooling 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:

• 10+ years of experience in software development roles.
• A mix of backend experience (scaling, concurrency, distributed data) and product instincts (API design, user empathy, workflow definition).
• Experience working in complex distributed systems with significant scale ("billions of events").
• Comfortable working directly with external engineering teams. You can communicate complex technical topics clearly.
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Ruby, Python) and experience with big data technologies (e.g., Kafka, Flink).
• Experience as a technical lead defining roadmaps for complex projects that span multiple teams.

Preferred requirements:

• Experience launching a complex technical product to General Availability (GA).
• Experience building and operating high-scale, real-time data processing systems.
• Familiarity with the specific growth patterns and technical needs of AI companies.
• Track record of evolving internal platforms into public-facing products.