Staff Backend Engineer, Data Platform

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 Datalake team builds and maintains Stripe's foundational data access and governance infrastructure: the paved path for safe, fast, and compliant access to Stripe's critical big data assets. The team serves developers, data engineers, analysts, ML and AI teams, security teams, and business users across the company.

The team is undertaking a significant architectural transition as Stripe grows, making Stripe's data lake a first-class citizen of the modern data ecosystem to support increasing scale and diverse workloads.

What Makes This Role Compelling

• Work on foundational infrastructure used by nearly every data workload at Stripe, affecting petabytes of data, hundreds of production pipelines, and engineering teams across the company.
• Lead the strategy for transitioning to a multi-cloud architecture and implement disaster recovery plans.
• Lead a multi-year migration to modern, open-source solutions such as Apache Iceberg, involving API design, compute engine integration, and authorization models.
• Influence technical strategy and the roadmap while working at the scale of a large company.

Responsibilities

• Architect the unified Iceberg platform by leading the technical design of a metastore service that becomes the single source of truth for Iceberg table management across Spark, Trino, Flink, and PyIceberg.
• Define API contracts, authorization models, per-table credential vending, and integration patterns for company-wide data pipelines.
• Lead compliance architecture by partnering with security and compliance teams to translate regulatory requirements into preventative technical controls, including audit logging, access review infrastructure, data segregation, and lifecycle enforcement.
• Drive cost and efficiency at petabyte scale by identifying inefficiencies in storage layout, snapshot retention, and data lifecycle, and designing automated self-service tooling.
• Own critical design reviews and establish standards for reliability, security, and developer experience.
• Mentor senior engineers through high-stakes architectural decisions and provide technical judgment to avoid structural debt.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed storage or data infrastructure systems.
• Deep experience with object storage such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob, or equivalent, including IAM, access control policy design, lifecycle management, and operational practices at petabyte scale.
• Proven ability to lead complex, multi-quarter infrastructure projects end-to-end, including cross-team dependency management and migrations across many consuming teams.
• Strong background in authorization and access control design for distributed data systems.

Preferred Requirements

• 5+ years of backend or infrastructure software engineering experience.
• Experience safely executing large-scale data migrations, including sequencing, blast-radius reduction, rollback, and data-integrity validation.
• Strong developer-experience sensibility and the ability to build ergonomic, well-documented abstractions that reduce toil for dependent engineering teams.

Office Expectations

Office-assigned Stripes in most locations are currently expected to spend at least 50% of the time in their local office or with users during a given month. This expectation may vary depending on the role, team, and location. Some teams may have greater in-office attendance requirements, which the hiring manager will discuss.

Compensation

Stripe lists a salary range of €132,000 to €198,000 per year for this role.