Software Engineer Intern

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a technology company focused on improving the conditions for economic growth and prosperity. We build programmable financial infrastructure, rethinking from first principles how financial services should work, to make it easier and cheaper for any business to start and scale. More than 10 million businesses build on Stripe, spanning the economic frontier—from solo founders to established enterprises—united by a practical focus on growth. The most ambitious companies in the world use Stripe as core infrastructure to grow faster. They process trillions of dollars a year on Stripe, equivalent to around 1.6% of global GDP. While economic growth makes everyone better off, open markets also enable greater variety. When any business can easily serve a global customer base, the quality and diversity of products in the world increase, and craft and creativity are unleashed into the smallest niches. Our own growth is wholly contingent on the success of the businesses building on Stripe. We therefore invest back into our technology at an unusual rate. We make upgrades to our products every single day to deliver compounding gains to our customers. We maintain some of the most reliable APIs on the internet. We build entirely new pieces of financial infrastructure to enable new ideas. And our significant advances in risk and fraud infrastructure over many years are making the internet economy safer and more accessible. 

Though people at Stripe don’t tend to take themselves seriously, Stripe is a fairly serious place: our customers are depending on us for their livelihoods. We admire ambition, intensity, curiosity, humility, and rigor. The most effective people become knowledgeable about many domains besides their own. Any company is an applied exercise in understanding some aspect of society or the market. In working with so many (especially the new and innovative ones), we think that Stripe is one of the very best places to learn about how the world works.

What you’ll do

As an intern at Stripe you’ll work on projects across our stack that directly impact the way millions of businesses operate. You’ll own problems end to end with the support of your manager and teammates. It’s an opportunity to work alongside some of the most creative and technically rigorous engineers in the industry and learn how to ship high-quality work at scale. By contributing to Stripe’s codebase you’ll work across domains that give you insight into how the global economy works. Recent intern projects include expanding Stripe’s Payments Foundation Model capabilities to improve generalized anomaly detection, building more approachable fraud controls, creating safer payouts, and developing user-facing solutions that prevent costly pricing mistakes and make merchant checkout setup easier.

Our internship program is competitive and the expectations are high. 

Responsibilities

• Operate as a real member of the team you join; engage in team discussions, decisions, and the technical design process.

• Write software that will be used in production, and has meaningful impact to Stripe’s business and users.

• Give and receive technical feedback through code reviews or design discussions

• Collaborate with other engineers and cross-functional stakeholders to proactively seek and incorporate feedback.

• Learn quickly by asking great questions, working with your intern manager and teammates effectively, communicating the status of your work clearly, and building with the latest AI tooling.

Who you are

• Ambitious builder: You’re energized by building solutions without clear precedent and solving problems with far-reaching consequences. Successful Stripes are deeply curious, and prefer the joy of discovery to the comfort of certainty.

• Rigorous thinker: You appreciate that things worth doing are rarely simple. You enjoy working on problems that have never been tackled before. 

• Adaptable problem solver: You adapt quickly and treat obstacles as opportunities. At Stripe we embrace kindness while encouraging Stripes to take measured risks and act boldly, even in the absence of consensus.

Minimum requirements

• A strong fundamental understanding of computer science through pursuit of a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science, math, or a related discipline. 

• Experience and familiarity with programming, either through side projects or classwork. We work mostly in Ruby, Java, Javascript, Go, and Scala. We believe new programming languages can be learned if the fundamentals and general knowledge are present.

• Experience from previous internships or other multi-person projects, including open source contributions, that demonstrate evaluating and receiving feedback from mentors, peers, and stakeholders.

• Ability to learn unfamiliar systems and form an understanding of those systems, through independent research and working with a mentor or subject matter experts. 

• Ability to leverage AI tools to accelerate development while applying rigorous critical thinking and professional judgement to review, refine, and validate all outputs.

Preferred qualifications

• At least 1 year of university education, or equivalent work experience.

• One or more areas of specialized knowledge (frontend, backend, infrastructure or other technologies) balanced with general skills and knowledge. 

• Experience writing high quality pull requests, with good test coverage, and working knowledge to complete projects with minimal defects.

• Familiarity with navigating and managing your work in new code bases, with multiple languages.

• Clear written communication skills, with the ability to write clearly to explain your work to stakeholders, team members, and other Stripes.