Staff Software Engineer, Risk Engineering

Stripe; Toronto; On-site; CAD 208,000 - 312,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Retirement plans

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Risk & Financial Crimes team in Toronto. You will own technical direction across screening, detection, and reviewer systems, balancing latency and accuracy, and collaborating with Legal, Compliance, and ML.

You will design high-scale, low-latency APIs and infrastructure, lead architecture, and mentor engineers while ensuring system reliability and regulatory compliance in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with leadership in core infrastructure or distributed systems.
• 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—from architecture to production debugging.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated ability to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year architecture for Stripe’s screening and reviewer tooling.
• Design and optimize high-scale distributed screening engines and detection pipelines.
• Build investigations infrastructure to surface suspicious activity and route cases to reviewers.
• Lead cross-functional technical alignment with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and drive high-stakes design reviews.
• Ensure system reliability, observability, and latency in a fast-moving regulatory environment.

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

APIs / backend

Communication skills

Tools

Ruby

Java

Infra tooling

Job description

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

Risk Engineering builds the systems that protect Stripe from fraud, credit losses, and regulatory risk across user onboarding, compliance, financial crimes, and identity verification.

Financial Crimes Engineering builds the systems and controls that let Stripe safely onboard businesses in emerging and regulated industries while keeping Stripe in compliance with sanctions law, anti-money-laundering rules, and financial partner requirements. We keep known bad actors off Stripe, find new through ongoing detection, and build AI-augmented tooling that helps expert reviewers resolve cases quickly and accurately.

We operate at scale, screening every user, enforcing jurisdictional restrictions across money movement in real time, and automating signal acquisition and synthesis into investigation workflows. We're now re-architecting our screening platform to make it safe and easy for new Stripe products to launch with the right financial crimes controls, to express richer policy as code, and to serve as a multi-tenant Risk Platform offering across Stripe's products and subsidiaries.

What you'll do

As a Staff Engineer on Financial Crimes Engineering, you'll own technical direction across our screening, detection, and review systems. You'll design infrastructure that balances screening latency with accuracy, build the systems that surface emerging risk and collect information to resolve it, and ensure investigators have the tooling they need. You'll work across distributed systems and policy logic, partnering with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate regulation into working software.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy & 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.

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 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.

Preferred qualifications

• Domain experience in financial crimes, sanctions screening, AML (Anti‑Money Laundering), entity resolution, or high‑stakes trust & safety platforms.
• Familiarity with applying LLMs or ML to operational workflows (e.g., case triage, entity resolution, review automation), or experience with fuzzy string matching and NLP for entity matching.
• Experience building investigator/analyst tooling, case management systems, or human‑in‑the‑loop review workflows.
• Experience building platform products or APIs consumed by both internal engineering teams and external developers (e.g., API backward compatibility, client libraries).
• Prior experience leading 0-1 platform builds or major architectural modernizations from concept to production.
• Tech stack experience across multi‑language environments (e.g., Primarily Ruby and Java) and modern data infrastructure
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making high‑judgment engineering calls in a fast‑moving regulatory environment

In-office expectations

Office‑assigned Stripes in most of our locations are currently expected to spend at least 50% of the time in a given month in their local office or with users. This expectation may vary depending on role, team and location. For example, Stripes in Stripe Delivery Center roles in Mexico City, Mexico, Bengaluru, India, and Dublin, Ireland work 100% from the office. Also, some teams have greater in‑office attendance requirements, to appropriately support our users and workflows, which the hiring manager will discuss. This approach helps strike a balance between bringing people together for in‑person collaboration and learning from each other, while supporting flexibility when possible.

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.

• Company: Stripe
• Team: Risk & Financial Crimes
• Office location: Toronto
• Employment type: Full time