Staff Engineer, Issuing

Details

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. The Issuing team owns the Stripe card issuing product end to end, including APIs and backend services for spend cards, debit cards, and charge cards, as well as dashboards and embedded components for managing card programs. The team builds infrastructure and interfaces that enable platforms and businesses to create, distribute, and control payment cards at scale, while managing the full cardholder lifecycle across commercial and consumer issuing.

Issuing is expanding into new geographies and card categories, including stablecoin, healthcare, and consumer credit, while developing deeper partnerships with major platforms. This role operates at the intersection of financial infrastructure, developer-facing APIs, and end-user product experience.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical strategy for Issuing, including multi-year architecture decisions across backend services, APIs, and user-facing surfaces.
• Own end-to-end technical solutions for critical systems, authorization flows, spending controls, cardholder management, and card program configuration, ensuring reliability, scalability, and operational soundness.
• Identify and lead infrastructure investments supporting geographic expansion, new card program types, and platform-level extensibility.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and cross-functional partners across Issuing, Authorization, Clearing and Settlement, and Balances to drive initiatives from design through launch.
• Make build-versus-reuse decisions and create technical roadmaps that balance near-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Advise engineering and product leadership on technical trade-offs and their business implications.
• Drive engineering standards, tooling improvements, and operational rigor across the team.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers and help build future technical leaders.
• Scope, design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and large-scale systems that reliably and efficiently handle billions of money movement requests.
• Debug and resolve critical production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across the company to build large-scale features while improving engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
• Collaborate effectively in a distributed and hybrid team.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of industry software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at staff or equivalent scope across multiple teams or systems.
• Experience designing and shipping large-scale user-facing products with highly available and financially correct distributed backend systems.
• Experience leading cross-functional engineering projects end to end, from requirements through architecture, delivery, and post-launch iteration.
• Strong API design skills and the ability to build simple, developer-friendly interfaces over complex financial and regulatory requirements.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align multiple teams without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication across engineering, product, and leadership audiences.
• A high-ownership mindset and the ability to define problems and plans in ambiguous environments.
• Ability to communicate complex technical topics clearly and precisely to technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating real-time transaction processing systems with strict latency and correctness requirements, such as authorization, payments, ledgering, or settlement systems.
• Familiarity with card network protocols, BIN sponsorship models, or issuing bank integrations, including Visa or Mastercard.
• Experience in regulated financial services, including compliance-aware system design, audit trails, financial controls, or KYC/KYB flows.
• Experience with embedded finance, card-as-a-service, or Banking-as-a-Service platforms.
• Experience with high-volume event-driven architectures and their reliability and consistency trade-offs.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and contributing to engineering hiring and culture.