Staff Software Engineer, API Platform

Stripe; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a Technical Lead for one of the most impactful teams in our infrastructure org. You will lead engineers, collaborate with infrastructure and product teams, and advance service-oriented architecture across Stripe's systems.

We value a strong background in building high-performance infrastructure, hands-on coding in Java, Ruby, Python, or Go, and a passion for mentorship, autonomy, and cross-functional collaboration.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of technical experience.
• 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role.
• Experience leading engineering teams on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries.
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers.
• Strong written and verbal communication and ability to work autonomously.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers, providing mentorship and guidance.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps with a cohesive vision.
• Understand user needs to prioritize engineering work and deliver high-quality solutions.
• Drive project execution from planning to delivery with high standards.
• Support Infrastructure's key engineering initiatives with stakeholders.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for architecture, design, and incident response.
• Collaborate across the company to drive Stripe's service roadmap.
• Foster a collaborative and inclusive team culture.

Tools

Kubernetes

Kafka

Databases

Logging

Caching

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

The API Platform team is responsible for empowering teams to build highly reliable and performant services, backing our payment systems, fraud detection, and a multitude of other products. As an infrastructure team, you will build and expand the service frameworks to make complex systems easy to use, resilient, and scalable. We build powerful interfaces for engineers that depend on these systems—deployment, load balancers, web framework, databases, Kafka, and Kubernetes—while keeping them highly available and performant. We're looking for engineering leaders who drive the technical vision of Stripe's service infrastructure platform for thousands of engineers to use and build on top of, and thrive in a highly autonomous environment with many moving pieces.

What you’ll do

You will join as a Technical Lead for one of the most impactful teams at Stripe. You will lead a team of engineers, collaborate with infrastructure and product engineering orgs, and advance service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption at Stripe. By collaborating with the team's technical leaders, you will ensure the software your team builds meets the needs of Stripe and its customers.

We are a highly effective team that consistently delivers high-impact results while genuinely caring for one another. We expect you to bring your curiosity and critical thinking skills to this challenging domain.

We are looking for individuals with a strong background in designing and delivering high-performance infrastructure products for both internal and external customers. We would love to hear from you whether you have spent your entire career in infrastructure or are looking to apply your skill set to the database engineering domain for the first time.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of talented engineers, providing mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success
• Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps that deliver milestones toward a cohesive engineering vision
• Understand user needs and pain points to prioritize engineering work and deliver high-quality solutions that meet user needs
• Drive the execution of projects, overseeing the entire development lifecycle from planning to delivery, while maintaining high standards of quality and timely completion
• Work with high-visibility teams and their stakeholders to support the Infrastructure's key engineering initiatives
• Provide hands-on technical leadership (architecture and design, vision, direction, and requirements setting, and incident response processes) for team members
• Work with leaders across the company to create and drive toward the longer term vision of Stripe's services roadmap
• Build a collaborative and inclusive work environment, promoting innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement within the team

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

• 12+ years of technical experience
• 5+ years 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)
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers
• 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 a high level of psychological safety for all team members and partners
• Proficient in at least one of the programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python, Go)

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for different audiences (leadership, users, company-wide)
• Experience with a variety of common infrastructure platforms (databases, logging, event streams, metrics, caching, etc.)
• Experience leading partially remote and distributed teams
• Experience developing sustainable, in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering orgs
• Experience building serverless platforms
• Experience managing rigorous incident response processes and on-call rotations

We don't expect deep expertise in every dimension above, but genuine curiosity about any of the areas that are less familiar is important to us.

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 US base salary range for this role is $224,000 - $336,000. 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.