Senior Staff Engineer, Big Data Infrastructure

Details

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. Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.

About the Team

The Big Data Infrastructure team builds and maintains the platforms that power data work across Stripe, managing three core layers:

• Data Orchestration: Airflow
• Batch Compute: Spark, Celeborn
• Data Lake: Iceberg, Hive, S3, Azure Blob Storage

The team supports over 2,000 engineers and more than 600 internal teams, processing workloads that grow organically by more than 30% year over year. Its infrastructure manages over 800 PB of data, runs 325,000 applications per day, and accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual spend, directly powering critical pipelines such as inbound payments, network reconciliation, and capital underwriting.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, overseeing distributed systems that manage 20% of Stripe’s total AWS spend.
• Guide a 40+ person engineering team in scaling foundational data systems.
• Partner with major internal customers, including Data Foundations, Payins Engineering, and AI/ML Foundations.
• Execute Stripe’s transition to the “Agentic Era” by building invisible infrastructure that empowers AI agents to author, validate, ship, and operate data pipelines.
• Drive the architecture and delivery of modernization initiatives, including YARN-to-Kubernetes migrations, native vectorization using Gluten and Velox, and Airflow and Data Catalog modernization.
• Lead the implementation of a multi-region and multi-cloud data strategy for high availability, disaster recovery, and Azure Blob Storage compliance.
• Reduce operational burden and maintenance overhead from more than 40% to under 10% by shifting fixes into the platform instead of relying on runbooks.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence and mentor engineers at various career stages, including Staff+ engineers.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field.
• Ideally 12+ years of professional experience in a software development role.
• A strong engineering background in distributed infrastructure and/or platform services, including one or more of storage, databases, or compute.
• Experience leading cross-team and company-wide projects, including scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime.
• Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems while optimizing their reliability and security.
• Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience driving AI-led architectural transformations and integrating agentic workflows into large-scale data systems.
• Experience working on a development team at AWS, Azure, OCI, or Google.
• Experience with large-scale big data infrastructure, such as Spark, Iceberg, S3, Airflow, YARN, and Celeborn.
• Experience with database internals and/or Kubernetes.