Staff Software Engineer, Issuing

Details

Stripe's 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 allow platforms and businesses to create, distribute, and control payment cards at scale, while supporting the full cardholder lifecycle across commercial and consumer issuing.

The role will provide technical leadership as Issuing expands into new geographies, card categories, and partnerships. It focuses on financial infrastructure, developer-facing APIs, and end-user product experience across a complex, fast-moving domain.

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, card program configuration, and other critical systems.
• Lead infrastructure investments supporting geographic expansion, new card program types, and platform-level extensibility.
• Collaborate with product managers, design, and cross-functional partners across Issuing, Authorization, Clearing and Settlement, and Balances.
• Make build-versus-reuse decisions and create technical roadmaps balancing 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.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers and help build future technical leaders.
• Scope, design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and large-scale systems handling billions of money movement requests.
• Debug and resolve critical production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to deliver large-scale features and improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
• Work effectively in a distributed and hybrid team.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of industry software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at staff or equivalent scope across multiple teams or systems.
• Proven 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 and architecture through 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 with engineers, product teams, and leadership.
• A high-ownership mindset and the ability to define problems and plans in ambiguous situations.
• 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, 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, including compliance-aware system design, audit trails, financial controls, or KYC and 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.