Staff Software Engineer, Business Data

Stripe; Washington; On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a Staff‑level data engineer to lead the data engineering team and own the canonical data foundation that powers decision making across Finance, Strategy, GTM, and Marketing. The role focuses on building scalable data pipelines with Airflow, Spark, Kafka, and Flink, working closely with Stripe teams to unlock new capabilities and trustable data assets.

This position emphasizes autonomy, data quality, and leadership, overseeing the full development lifecycle and driving

Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating data systems
• Strong SQL experience and backend language experience
• Ability to lead teams and drive data initiatives
• Excellent cross‑functional collaboration and communication

Responsibilities

• Lead technical outcomes for a data engineering team
• Deliver scalable data pipelines that meet user needs
• Collaborate with product managers and other Stripe teams
• Oversee SLAs for data pipelines and full stack apps
• Develop canonical datasets and data warehouses with trusted data
• Leverage AI/LLM and agents at scale for data insights
• Drive end‑to‑end data initiatives from planning to delivery
• Foster a collaborative and inclusive team environment

Skills

Data pipelines

SQL proficiency

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Problem solving

Excellent communication

Tools

Airflow

Spark

Kafka

Flink

Hive Metastore

Pinot

Trino

AWS

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

We are experts in business data, building the canonical data foundation that powers decision‑making across Finance & Strategy, Business Data Science, GTM, and Marketing. We engineer scalable and efficient data pipelines and provide curated data products that give Stripe's teams a consistent, accurate, and fresh view of the business—from the top to the bottom of the funnel. We work side by side with partner teams—AI, Data Science, and Business Systems—to deliver high‑quality data assets that power growth motions, product performance tracking, and go‑to‑market metrics reporting. We invest in data quality, data engineering automation, and operational excellence to minimize issues and maintain the trust our customers place in the products we build.

What you’ll do

We're looking for a person who could contribute to the team by solving high-impact, cutting‑edge data problems. The ideal candidate will be someone that has built data pipelines for large scale volume, is deeply knowledgeable of key tools including Airflow/Spark/Kafka/Flink, is empathetic, excels at building strong relationships, and collaborates effectively with other Stripe teams to understand their use cases and unlock new capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical outcomes for a team of ambitious, talented engineers, providing mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success
• Partner with our recruiting team to attract and hire top talent
• Deliver cutting‑edge data pipelines that scale to users' needs, focusing on reliability and efficiency
• Develop strong subject matter expertise and manage the SLAs of data pipelines and full stack web applications that support critical stakeholders
• Collaborate with product managers and peers across the company to create/improve canonical datasets and data warehouses, use golden paths, and ensure Stripes and customers are using trustworthy data
• Leverage AI/LLM and Agents at scale to produce and analyze high‑quality data on ambiguous problems
• Have the opportunity to drive the execution of key data initiatives for Stripe, overseeing the entire development lifecycle from planning to delivery while maintaining high standards of quality and timely completion
• Foster 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

• This is a Staff‑level role — that typically means 10+ years of experience building and operating data systems, pipelines, warehouses, infrastructure, and leading teams to deliver exceptional solutions
• A strong engineering background and passion for data as well as prior experience with writing and debugging data pipelines using a distributed data framework
• An inquisitive nature in diving into data inconsistencies to pinpoint issues, and resolve deep rooted data quality issues
• Knowledge of a backend development language (such as Scala, Java, or Go) and strong SQL experience
• Extreme customer focus, with a commitment to partnering with product, leaders across the business, and other Stripe engineers to understand their use cases
• Effective cross‑functional collaboration, with the ability to think rigorously, communicate clearly, and make or coordinate difficult decisions and trade‑offs
• Thrive with high autonomy and responsibility in an ambiguous environment
• Ability to foster and work in a healthy, inclusive, challenging, and supportive work environment

Preferred qualifications

• Our stack is made up of Iceberg, Kafka, Change Data Capture, Flink, Spark, Airflow, Hive Metastore, Pinot, Trino, and AWS Cloud - experience with all or some of these tools is a huge plus
• Influencing open‑source contributions
• Experience creating and maintaining data marts / warehouses to power business reporting needs
• Experience collaborating with Product, Go‑To‑Market, or Sales / Marketing teams
• Genuine enjoyment of innovation and a deep interest in understanding how things work, with the ability to question and direct architectural decisions
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for various audiences, including leadership, users, and company‑wide