Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

Details

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Risk Engineering builds systems that protect Stripe from fraud, credit losses, and regulatory risk across user onboarding, compliance, financial crimes, and identity verification.

Financial Crimes Engineering builds systems and controls that enable Stripe to safely onboard businesses in emerging and regulated industries while maintaining compliance with sanctions law, anti-money-laundering rules, and financial partner requirements. The team screens every user, enforces jurisdictional restrictions across money movement in real time, and automates signal acquisition and synthesis into investigation workflows.

As a Staff Engineer on Financial Crimes Engineering, you will own the technical direction across screening, detection, and review systems. You will design infrastructure that balances screening latency with accuracy, build systems that surface emerging risk and collect information to resolve it, and ensure investigators have the tooling they need. You will work across distributed systems and policy logic, partnering with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate regulation into working software.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical strategy and multi-year architecture for real-time entity-matching infrastructure, policy-enforcement engines, and reviewer tooling.
• Design and optimize distributed screening engines and detection pipelines handling entity- and transaction-level requests at scale with strict SLA and uptime guarantees.
• Build investigations infrastructure that surfaces suspicious activity, collects additional information from users, routes cases to reviewers, and augments human judgment with AI.
• Serve as the primary technical voice with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product leaders to translate evolving global regulatory requirements into technical solutions.
• Lead the architectural evolution toward a multi-tenant screening platform supporting internal product launches and external developer-facing APIs.
• Set standards for system design, API consistency, and operational rigor across backend and ML-adjacent systems.
• Mentor senior engineers and lead high-stakes design reviews.
• Own system reliability, observability, and latency, ensuring production systems adapt to changes in global sanctions lists and traffic spikes.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for these systems.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role involving core infrastructure, distributed systems, or platform engineering.
• Proven experience designing, building, and operating high-throughput, low-latency APIs and distributed backend systems at scale.
• A track record of defining technical roadmaps and driving alignment across multiple engineering teams and cross-functional domains.
• Hands-on technical depth, including high-level system architecture, code-level performance tuning, and production debugging.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with experience articulating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in financial crimes, sanctions screening, anti-money laundering, entity resolution, or high-stakes trust and safety platforms.
• Familiarity with applying LLMs or machine learning to operational workflows such as case triage, entity resolution, and review automation.
• Experience with fuzzy string matching and natural language processing for entity matching.
• Experience building investigator or analyst tooling, case management systems, or human-in-the-loop review workflows.
• Experience building platform products or APIs consumed by internal engineering teams and external developers, including API backward compatibility and client libraries.
• Experience leading 0-to-1 platform builds or major architectural modernizations from concept to production.
• Experience with multi-language technology environments, primarily Ruby and Java, and modern data infrastructure.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity and making high-judgment engineering decisions in a fast-moving regulatory environment.