Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning Platform

Stripe; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 208,000 - 312,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Wellness stipend

Health benefits

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a Staff Engineer for the ML Platform to lead the evolution of ML infrastructure powering Stripe's products. You will shape long-term strategy, mentor engineers, and drive reliable, scalable systems across ML training, serving, and deployment.

You will work with ML engineers, data scientists, and product teams to translate needs into resilient technical solutions, balancing latency, security, and cost in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software development or equivalent domain expertise.
• Experience leading technical direction and multi-team initiatives.
• Background building/operating production ML platforms with performance and cost efficiency.
• Strong product instincts and ability to communicate with both technical and business stakeholders.
• Proven cross-functional collaboration with ML engineers, data scientists, software engineers, and product managers.
• Ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous environments with hands-on AI tooling.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of end-to-end architecture and system design for large ML Platform projects.
• Define technical direction for highly ambiguous initiatives and translate needs into platform strategy.
• Design architectures for ML training, serving, orchestration, and large-scale feature stores.
• Turn ideas into robust solutions shaping platform and product roadmaps.
• Lead large projects from requirements to design, implementation, and production operation.
• Collaborate with ML engineers, data scientists, and product teams to deliver scalable solutions.
• Arbitrate decisions balancing latency, reliability, cost, and security constraints.
• Mentor engineers and drive ML development velocity and MLOps maturity.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

ML platforms

Cross-functional collaboration

Autonomy

Mentoring

Tools

AWS

SageMaker

Databricks

OpenAI

Job description

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.

Who we are

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

Stripe processes over $1.9T in payments volume per year, which is roughly 1.6% of the world's GDP, for millions of customers from startups to enterprises. The tremendous amount of data makes Stripe one of the best places to do machine learning. While being an integral part of almost every product line at Stripe (e.g., Payments, Radar, Capital, Billing, etc.), we have lots of exciting opportunities to innovate in ML Platform at Stripe.

The ML Platform team builds the platforms and services that enable ML engineers and data scientists across Stripe to take data and build features and models from prototype to production—reliably, at low latency, and at scale. Our scope spans ML training infrastructure, model serving and deployment, feature computation and online serving, observability and monitoring, and agentic AI capabilities. We work closely with product teams, data scientists, and platform infrastructure teams to build powerful, flexible, and user-friendly systems that substantially increase ML velocity across the company.

What you'll do

You'll serve as a technical lead across the ML Platform space and a key contributor to the evolution of the platforms that power Stripe's ML-driven products. As a Staff Engineer, you'll make decisions with a large impact on Stripe. You'll influence our investments and strategy while making our systems more reliable, secure, and a delight to use. You'll work cross-functionally with other technical staff, data science, product, and senior leadership to increase the impact of ML at Stripe.

You'll help define the long-term strategy and lead the technical direction for the next generation of ML infrastructure that powers Stripe's ML-driven products.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership of end-to-end architecture and system design for large, complex projects across ML Platform.
• Define technical direction for highly ambiguous projects, transforming complex user needs into long-lasting platform strategy.
• Design system architectures for the most challenging ML Platform problems in one or more areas, including AI and ML workflow orchestration, scalable CPU and GPU compute infrastructure, model training, LLM fine-tuning, low-latency model inference, large-scale feature stores, real-time monitoring, and LLM and agent orchestration.
• Turn high-leverage ideas into tangible, robust solutions that shape platform and product roadmap, combining technical excellence with creative problem-solving.
• Scope and lead large projects with significant business impact, driving them from requirements through design, implementation, and production operation.
• Work with ML engineers, data scientists, and product teams directly to translate their needs into functional requirements and scalable technical solutions.
• Arbitrate critical decisions that balance competing priorities while meeting latency, reliability, cost, and security constraints.
• Serve as a key engineering representative, engaging senior leaders across Stripe and advising the leadership team on key technical considerations related to the end-to-end ML lifecycle.
• Drive cross-team technical initiatives that improve ML development velocity and MLOps maturity across the company.
• Mentor and grow other engineers. Serve as a role model for designing, implementing, and operating great software systems.

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 professional software development experience, or equivalent domain expertise, with a solid background in service-oriented architecture and large-scale distributed systems.
• Track record of serving as a technical lead, with the ability to provide technical direction, lead multi-team initiatives, and mentor team members.
• Experience building and operating production ML platform in one or more areas such as model training, model serving, orchestration, or ML data systems, with requirements for performance, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Strong product instincts and a deep understanding of the business context in which you operate.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally, collaborating effectively with ML engineers, data scientists, software engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders.
• The ability to thrive on a high level of autonomy and responsibility, and comfort operating in ambiguous environments.
• Hands-on experience using AI tools to accelerate how you work.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building large-scale ML training, serving, or data infrastructure for machine learning use cases, such as distributed training, model inference, feature stores, real-time feature computation, and model registries.
• Experience with distributed ML training systems, accelerator-backed compute, training data pipelines, experiment tracking, and model evaluation.
• Experience rapidly developing prototypes and iterating based on user feedback.
• Experience training and shipping machine learning models to production to solve critical business problems.
• Familiarity with LLMs, LLM application frameworks, and agentic AI patterns (e.g., tool use, multi-agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation).
• Familiarity with cloud services (e.g., AWS) and cloud-based AI and ML services (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock, Databricks, OpenAI).
• Ability to synthesize ideas across the organization while setting a compelling technical vision.
• Comfortable working with geographically distributed teams.
• Passion for side projects, open source, or self-driven technical initiatives.

Hybrid work at Stripe

This role is available either in an office or a remote location (35+ miles or 56+ km from a Stripe office).

In-office expectations

Office-assigned Stripes spend at least 50% of the time in a given month in their local office or with users. This hits a balance between bringing people together for in-person collaboration and learning from each other, while supporting flexibility about how to do this in a way that makes sense for individuals and their teams.

Working remotely at Stripe

A remote location is defined as being 35 miles (56 kilometers) or more from one of our offices. While you would be welcome to come into the office for team/business meetings, on-sites, meet-ups, and events, our expectation is you would regularly work from home rather than a Stripe office. Stripe does not cover the cost of relocating to a remote location. We encourage you to apply for roles that match the location where you currently live or plan to live.

Pay and benefits

The annual salary range for this role in the primary location is CA$208,000 - CA$312,000. This range may change if you are hired in another location. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings (“OTE”) range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Stripe and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and specific location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the primary location may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Specific benefits and details about what compensation is included in the salary range listed above will vary depending on the applicant’s location and can be discussed in more detail during the interview process. Benefits/additional compensation for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; retirement plans; health benefits; and wellness stipends.

We look forward to hearing from you.

At Stripe, we're looking for people with passion, grit, and integrity. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. At Stripe, we welcome diverse perspectives and people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions. Join us.