Staff Software Engineer, Payments Intelligence

Stripe; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

401(k)

Medical/Dental/Vision

Wellness stipend

Job summary

Stripe is seeking a Staff Engineer in Payment Intelligence in Seattle to shape the technical direction across multiple experiences, ensuring scalable, high-quality systems on the critical path. You will influence architecture, collaborate with ML and infrastructure teams, and drive impactful delivery.

You will work with senior engineers, product managers, and merchants to build robust, observable systems that power payment insights and revenue opportunities for Stripe and its customers.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in a strategic leadership role.
• Experience leading teams on distributed systems, API design, and user-facing products.
• Proven track record delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate growth.
• Ability to balance high-level direction with hands-on contribution.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy for experiences across the Payment Intelligence portfolio, focusing on quality and performance.
• Champion a quality-first engineering culture with standards, tooling, and processes for scalable shipping.
• Partner with Stripe's largest merchants to co-build the future of payment-centric intelligence.
• Collaborate across product, design, and ML to ship best software.
• Contribute across the stack including infrastructure, FE, API, and ML-adjacent work.

Skills

Distributed systems

API design

Cross-functional leadership

Hands-on coding

Communication

Tools

Java

Ruby

Python

TypeScript

Kafka

Flyte

Airflow

MongoDB

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

Payment Intelligence is comprised of multiple product teams building AI-first solutions to some of our customers’ biggest challenges, including fraud/abuse (Radar), payment optimizations (AuthBoost), Disputes, Authentication, and merchant analytics. We’re a mix of machine engineering engineers and full-stack software engineers impacting ~every Stripe transaction, creating revenue opportunities for Stripe and our customers, and helping protect the broader ecosystem. We have the benefit and privilege of working on cutting edge technologies with incredible scale and reach while also working directly with our merchants every day to build the right products for their needs.

What you’ll do

As a Staff Engineer on Payment Intelligence, you’ll work across our product portfolio to ensure we’re building in a consistent, efficient, and effective manner. Experience with large, distributed systems on the critical path will help candidates succeed, as will comfort working across the stack and interacting with ML teams and models.

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy for multiple experiences across the Payment Intelligence portfolio, with a focus on quality and performance
• Champion a quality-first engineering culture - establish standards, tooling, and processes that make it easy to ship high-quality code at scale
• Partner with some of Stripe’s largest merchants to co-build the future of payment-centric intelligence
• Partner cross-functionally with product, design, and ML colleagues to ship the very best software possible
• Work across the stack - contributing to infrastructure and foundational systems, but also FE, API, and ML-adjacent work.

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience in a strategic technical leadership role
• Experience leading engineering team(s) working on Distributed systems, API design, and user facing products
• Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth
• Ability to drive projects at a high-level while also being hands on and contributing directly to technical solutions as necessary
• Effective communication skills and a proven ability to work cross-team, cross-org, and cross-functionally.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with payments systems and/or fraud detection
• Familiarity with ML systems in production: model serving, training pipelines, observability, and evaluation
• Prior experience with 0-1 product builds: you've started with a blank page and ended with a production system, and you have clear opinions about what makes that process go well or poorly
• Experience across a range of software languages and frameworks; our stack includes Java, Ruby, Python, TypeScript, Kafka, Flyte, Airflow, and Mongo.
• Experience navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving organization - you can make confident technical decisions with incomplete information and update gracefully when new constraints emerge

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.

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.