Staff Software Engineer - API Platform

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 is one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world, and we’re scaling in every dimension: users, revenue, people, technology, processes, and more. The API Platform team is building the systems that support Stripe’s API. We’re looking for people passionate about distilling complexity across a breadth of problems, caring deeply about both our infrastructure and the experience of using our platform. We are major contributors to the latency, reliability, and efficiency of Stripe’s API, and you’ll be responsible for ensuring we maintain a reliable and secure platform.

What you’ll do

The API Platform is a unique environment where you’ll be working on the business-critical infrastructure and constructs that are behind Stripe’s products. This team owns the backbone that powers Stripe’s APIs, Developer, and User Experiences. If making systems efficient, scalable, and reliable in a highly fast-paced environment is your bread and butter, then this job is for you.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of talented engineers, providing mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success. Our staff engineers frequently find clever solutions to make the impossible possible, and to supercharge those around them to hit aggressive deadlines.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps that deliver milestones toward a cohesive engineering vision.
• Own highly impactful projects end-to-end, working across teams, organizations, and stakeholders to support the Infrastructure’s key engineering initiatives.
• Interact directly with users to understand key pain points, and apply your understanding to infrastructure’s hardest problems.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership (architecture/design, vision/direction/requirements setting, and incident response processes) for team members.
• Ensure our APIs are secure, reliable, and performant for our partners in product, while strategically solving for their problems.
• Build and ship amazing end-to-end APIs.

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 technical experience ideally in the infrastructure / platform engineering field.
• 5+ years in a (>senior) strategic technical leadership role.
• Experience leading engineering team(s) building APIs and working on infrastructure efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
• Hands-on experience working across teams and stakeholders to build infrastructure and products for internal customers.
• Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth, and shipping code at an accelerated pace.
• 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).
• Comfortable participating in rigorous incident response processes and on call rotations.
• Comfortable working across timezones (particularly PST).

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for different audiences (leadership, users, company-wide).
• Experience with a variety of common infrastructure platforms (webhook delivery, databases, logging, event streams, metrics, caching, etc).
• Generally enjoys an in-office culture.
• Experience developing sustainable, in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering orgs.
• Experience building serverless platforms.

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 €132,000 - €198,000. 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.