Staff Engineer, Stripe
Identity
$224-336k
A financial infrastructure platform for businesses
Be an early applicant
A financial infrastructure platform for businesses
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$224-336k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To increase the GDP of the internet
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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 high level of psychological safety for all team members and partner
- Has experience in a range of software languages and frameworks. Examples of what we work with include:
- Languages: primarily Ruby and Typescript, but also Python, Scala, Java, Go, and SQL (Spark and Trino dialects)
- Frameworks: React, GraphQL Kafka, Protobuf, Airflow, Bazel, Temporal,
- Others: Mongo, Splunk, Prometheus
Desirable
- 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
- Exposure to the technical stack we work with: primarily Ruby and TypeScript on the backend and web, Python for ML and data pipelines, with infrastructure spanning Kafka, Temporal, Protobuf, React, and distributed data stores
- Experience navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving organization — you can make confident technical decisions with incomplete information and update gracefully when new constraints emerge
What the job involves
- As a 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
- 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
Our take
Stripe, nowadays a FinTech giant, spent the first few years since its founding building up its payments business, which primarily consisted of providing an API to eCommerce businesses so that they could easily integrate a payment option in their apps or websites, where before there was none.
More recently, Stripe has started to accelerate its growth with a significantly larger range of financial services including cash advances and credit cards. They also plan to build incorporation services, fraud protection, and more, diversifying its revenue away from payments and differentiating itself from its competitors.
To further expand its position, the company is extending its services to countries with vast customer potential, including Brazil, Japan and India. It is also partnering with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT - a win-win collaboration that is monetising OpenAI’s flagship products and at the same time enhancing Stripe with GPT-4, as it moves forward with intentions to "build the payments foundation for tomorrow's AI economy."
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 14 rounds)
Mar 2023
$6.5bn
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Mar 2021
$600m
SERIES H
Total funding: $8.7bn
Company benefits
- Unlimited paid time off policy
- Work from home opportunities
- Comprehensive mental, physical and medical health plans
- Fertility benefits and parental leave
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Patrick Collison
(CEO)Studied maths at MIT before founding Stripe. Also on the board of the Long Now Foundation.
John Collison
(President)Studied at Harvard but dropped out to found Stripe.
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