Backend Engineer, Core Technology

Stripe; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 143,000 - 214,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k)

Medical/Dental/Vision

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a highly capable software engineer to join the Infrastructure team, building and operating the core systems that power Stripe at scale. You will design, implement, test, and ship code across distributed services, collaborating with multiple internal customers and stakeholders.

The role requires strong experience with large-scale distributed systems and modern programming languages (Go, Java, C/C++), plus the ability to work autonomously in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills across Go/Java/C/C++.
• 2–12+ years of professional software development experience.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Ability to collaborate across workstreams and stakeholders.
• Customer obsession and entrepreneurial mindset.
• Experience optimizing distributed systems performance.

Responsibilities

• Build a great customer experience for internal and external Stripe teams using our infrastructure.
• Participate in roadmap planning and prioritization.
• Deliver value through a strong collaborative approach with multiple customers and stakeholders across Stripe.
• Debug production issues across services and multiple layers of the stack.

Skills

Go

Java

C/C++

Distributed systems

Autonomy

Customer obsession

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
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
Stripe Infrastructure is responsible for the reliability, scale, performance, and cost of Stripe's systems and the productivity and sentiment of Stripe's people.
You may work on a wide variety of critical business areas including:

• Core Infrastructure—We're the home for Stripe's critical tier0 infrastructure systems (Compute, Networking, DocumentDB, Distributed Caching and High assurance engineering). We build the foundational platform for Stripe products and services to allow them to operate at scale. We drive reliability, availability, efficiency, and scalability of these systems.
• Developer Infrastructure—We're responsible for the productivity of all developers at Stripe. Ensure Stripe's engineers have a reliable, fast, and easy-to-use inner dev loop to maximize productivity while building everything from low-latency microservices to large-scale data pipelines and machine learning models.
• Data Infrastructure—We're responsible for offering data serving infrastructure spanning across data warehouse analytics, streaming analytics, and search capabilities. The stack is supported by a collection of internally developed large-scale distributed services and several popular open-source technologies like Trino/Presto, Apache Pinot, Hive Metastore, ElasticSearch etc. The systems we own support all of the data serving needs of high-scale services and thousands of individual Stripes across the company.
• Admin Platform—We empower Stripes to quickly build secure and delightful internal products in service of their users.
• Service Platform—We enable engineering teams at Stripe to easily write and ship useful services that correctly, reliably, and efficiently leverage platform capabilities.
• Developer Productivity AI—We're responsible for doubling Stripe's engineering velocity through effective use of LLMs. We own Minions, Stripe's one-shot, end-to-end coding agents.

Team matching—exact team matching for one of the subteams will begin during final stages. Please note we may also consider you for different orgs based on your experience, location, etc. Find more information on our team matching process here.
What you'll do
You'll work on projects that span technologies, systems, and processes where you'll design, build, test, and ship great code every day.
Responsibilities

• Build a great customer experience for internal and external Stripe teams using our infrastructure
• Participate in roadmap planning and prioritization
• Deliver value through a strong collaborative approach with multiple customers and stakeholders across Stripe
• Debug production issues across services and several levels of the stack

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

• Strong software engineering skills and a passion for one of the areas above
• Ability to write high-quality code (in programming languages like Go, Java, C/C++ etc.)
• 2–12+ years of professional hands-on software development experience, able to write well-factored algorithms and have experience with commonly used data structures and algorithms
• Hands-on experience contributing to or building large-scale distributed systems
• Strong collaboration skills, can work across workstreams within your team and contribute to your peers' success
• Customer obsession, ability to articulate and represent customer experience in various forums to drive the right outcome
• Have the ability to thrive on a high level of autonomy and responsibility, and think of yourself as entrepreneurial

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience optimizing the end-to-end performance of distributed systems
• Focus on the needs of our users, both internal and external
• Hold yourself and others to a high bar when working with production

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
This space outlines expectations for in-person presence and collaboration. 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 US base salary range for this role is $142,600 - $213,800. 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 location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the US may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Additional benefits for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; medical, dental, and vision 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.

Apply now

Please find our California applicant personal information notice here.

The application window will remain open for 100 days after the Job Post is published. However, this opportunity will remain open based on the needs of the business, which may cause the application window to close before or after the 100-day mark.