Staff Engineer, Risk & Financial Crimes Platform

Stripe; Toronto; On-site; CAD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a Staff Engineer on Financial Crimes Engineering to own technical direction across screening, detection, and review systems. You will design infrastructure balancing latency with accuracy and work across distributed systems, policy logic, partnering with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate regulation into working software.

You will define strategy, architect high-scale components, enable multi-tenant risk platform, mentor engineers, and ensure reliability and observability

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role on core infrastructure, distributed systems, or platform engineering.
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating high-throughput, low-latency APIs and distributed backend systems at scale.
• Track record of defining technical roadmaps and driving alignment across multiple engineering teams and cross-functional domains.
• Hands-on technical depth - comfortable jumping from high-level system architecture down to code-level performance tuning and production debugging.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of articulating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and vision: Establish the multi-year architecture for Stripe's real-time entity matching infrastructure, policy enforcement engines, and reviewer tooling
• Architect high-scale systems: Design and optimize distributed screening engines and detection pipelines handling entity- and transaction-level requests at scale with strict SLA and uptime guarantees.
• Build investigations infrastructure: Design the systems that surface suspicious activity, collect additional information from users, route cases to reviewers, and augment human judgment with AI to drive faster, more accurate case resolution.
• Drive cross-functional technical alignment: Serve as the primary technical voice with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product leaders to translate evolving global regulatory requirements into technical ones.
• Enable Risk as a Service: Lead the architectural evolution toward a multi-tenant screening platform - laying the technical foundation for both internal product launches and external developer-facing APIs.
• Raise the engineering bar: Set standards for system design, API consistency, and operational rigor across backend and ML-adjacent systems; mentor senior engineers and lead high-stakes design reviews.
• Ensure operational excellence: Own system reliability, observability, and latency, ensuring production systems adapt quickly to sudden changes in global sanctions lists or traffic spikes, and participate in an on-call rotation for these systems.

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Low-latency APIs

System architecture

Communication skills

Tools

Ruby

Java

Job description

Stripe is seeking a Staff Engineer on Financial Crimes Engineering to own technical direction across screening, detection, and review systems. You will design infrastructure balancing latency with accuracy and work across distributed systems, policy logic, partnering with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate regulation into working software.

You will define strategy, architect high-scale components, enable multi-tenant risk platform, mentor engineers, and ensure reliability and observability