Staff Software Engineer, Card Issuing and Payments

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 that power spend cards, debit cards, and charge cards, as well as dashboards and embedded components for managing card programs.

The role focuses on the intersection of financial infrastructure, developer-facing APIs, and end-user product experience. Issuing is expanding into new geographies, card categories, and partnerships with major platforms.

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 authorization flows, spending controls, cardholder management, and card program configuration.
• Lead infrastructure investments supporting geographic expansion, new card program types, and platform-level extensibility.
• Collaborate with product managers, design, and partners across Issuing, Authorization, Clearing and Settlement, and Balances.
• Make build-versus-reuse decisions and produce technical roadmaps balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform health.
• Advise engineering and product leadership on technical trade-offs.
• Drive engineering standards, tooling improvements, and operational rigor.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers.
• Scope, design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and large-scale systems handling billions of money movement requests.
• Debug and solve critical production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to build large-scale features and improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
• Work effectively in a distributed and hybrid team.

Requirements

• 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 from requirements through architecture, delivery, and post-launch iteration.
• Strong API design skills and the ability to build 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 with engineers, product teams, and leadership.
• High ownership and comfort with ambiguity.
• Ability to communicate complex technical topics clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating real-time transaction processing systems with strict latency and correctness requirements, including authorizations, payments, ledgering, or settlement.
• Familiarity with card network protocols, BIN sponsorship models, or issuing bank integrations, including Visa or Mastercard.
• Experience in regulated financial services, compliance-aware system design, audit trails, financial controls, or KYC/KYB flows.
• Background in 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.