Staff Software Engineer, API Platform

Details

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. The API Platform team empowers teams to build highly reliable and performant services supporting payment systems, fraud detection, and other products. The team develops service frameworks and interfaces for deployment, load balancers, web frameworks, databases, Kafka, and Kubernetes.

The role serves as a Technical Lead responsible for leading a team of engineers, collaborating with infrastructure and product engineering organizations, and advancing service-oriented architecture adoption at Stripe.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers by providing mentorship, guidance, and support.
• Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps and deliver milestones toward a cohesive engineering vision.
• Understand user needs and pain points to prioritize engineering work and deliver high-quality solutions.
• Drive project execution across the development lifecycle, from planning through delivery.
• Work with high-visibility teams and stakeholders to support key infrastructure engineering initiatives.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership in architecture and design, vision, direction, requirements setting, and incident response processes.
• Work with leaders across the company to develop and execute the long-term vision for Stripe's services roadmap.
• Build a collaborative and inclusive work environment that promotes innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• 12+ years of technical experience.
• 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role.
• Experience leading engineering teams working on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries, including internal or external developer products.
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers.
• Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth.
• Ability to move between high-level discussions and detailed coding.
• High level of autonomy and responsibility.
• Clear and persuasive written and in-person communication skills.
• Strong problem-solving skills, critical thinking, determination, and a growth mindset.
• Ability to work effectively with diverse groups and contribute to psychological safety.
• Proficiency in at least one of Java, Ruby, Python, or Go.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for different audiences, including leadership, users, and the company.
• Experience with infrastructure platforms such as databases, logging, event streams, metrics, and caching.
• Experience leading partially remote and distributed teams.
• Experience developing sustainable, in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering organizations.
• Experience building serverless platforms.
• Experience managing rigorous incident response processes and on-call rotations.

Deep expertise in every listed area is not required, but curiosity about less familiar areas is important.