Staff Backend 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 technical delivery and innovation for a team of talented engineers with a wide breadth of mission-critical ownership
• Lead technical vision for core code across Stripe APIs and webhooks, used by all developers at Stripe. Focus on efficiency, usability, and product partner happiness.
• Lead technical vision for deep infrastructure challenges across complex systems, ensuring best-in-class scaling, reliability, and efficiency.
• Coach a team of talented engineers, providing technical mentorship 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.
• Own highly impactful projects independently and end-to-end, working across teams, organizations, and stakeholders to support the Infrastructure’s key engineering initiatives.
• Interact directly with users and partner teams to understand key pain points, and apply your understanding to infrastructure’s hardest problems.
• 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 demonstrate business impact.
• Proven track record of 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.