Staff Software Engineer, Release Engineering

Details

Who We Are

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform used by businesses worldwide. The Core Change Management group builds systems that enable Stripe engineers to ship code, configuration, and infrastructure changes safely and efficiently.

You will be embedded primarily on the Service Deployments team, which owns Stripe's end-to-end code deployment platform, and will regularly collaborate with the Resource Automation and Feature Deployments teams.

Service Deployments owns the full lifecycle of software changes at Stripe, including deployment orchestration, rollout safety, reliability, and developer experience. Resource Automation owns automated remote execution, Infrastructure as Code tooling, cloud resource inventory, cloud account governance, and IAM role management. Feature Deployments owns feature flags, merchant entitlements, configuration management and distribution, and change-related audit logs.

What Makes This Role Compelling

• Own the foundation of how Stripe ships software. The deployment platform is in the critical path of every engineer's workflow and supports thousands of deployments per day across hundreds of services.
• Work on active platform transformations, including containerizing host-based services at scale, building intelligent multi-service deployment pipelines, extending real-time anomaly detection to earlier traffic-shift stages, and rebuilding deployment event infrastructure on a durable message bus.
• Span the full stack, from container scheduling and deployment orchestration business logic to the developer-facing internal platform UI.
• Improve reliability by building better detection, smarter pipelines, and safer defaults to reduce change-related production incidents.
• Set technical direction, author designs spanning multiple teams, and guide engineering managers and engineers through difficult deployment infrastructure decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end technical delivery of large, ambiguous infrastructure projects, from initial design through production launch and long-term reliability.
• Architect the next generation of Stripe's deployment platform, including multi-service dependency-aware autodeploy pipelines, Kubernetes-native deployment primitives, and fleetwide container migration.
• Define API contracts, rollout strategies, and operational models used by hundreds of teams.
• Extend deployment anomaly detection by expanding blue-green traffic analysis to earlier traffic-split stages, designing API- and method-based regression detection, and building self-service onboarding for supported service types.
• Lead the migration of host-based services to containerized, fleetwide deployments, including sequencing, backward compatibility, and cross-team coordination.
• Own reliability and operational excellence for the deployment platform, including incident response, toil reduction, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Build deployment notification and event-publishing infrastructure, including event schemas, durability models, and integration contracts for observability and automation.
• Collaborate with Resource Automation on cloud resource management, IAM, account provisioning, and infrastructure automation.
• Collaborate with Feature Deployments on feature flags, configuration management, and change audit logs.
• Collaborate with the service mesh team on routing capabilities for canary rollouts and merchant-priority traffic shaping.
• Lead design reviews, establish standards for deployment safety and developer experience, mentor senior engineers, and promote effective abstractions.
• Decompose complex platform challenges into scoped, parallelizable work and provide decisive technical guidance.

Requirements

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing and shipping large-scale production infrastructure systems.
• Proven ability to lead ambiguous infrastructure projects from technical design through delivery, including cross-team dependencies and migrations across many consuming teams.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and deployment orchestration, including service construction, scheduling, operations at scale, rollout strategies, staged delivery, and failure modes.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container-based deployments, including service lifecycle management, workload scheduling, and migration from VM-based to containerized infrastructure.
• Strong background in service reliability and operational excellence, including incident response, toil reduction, and building reliable, debuggable, and maintainable systems.
• Broad technical impact across multiple large systems, including complex codebases, code review, mentorship, and setting technical direction.

Preferred Requirements

• Experience with deployment safety systems such as anomaly detection, automated rollback, or progressive delivery.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, including Kafka or equivalent systems, for deployment lifecycle observability and notifications.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code at scale, such as Terraform or equivalent, particularly for cloud resource governance and IAM management in AWS or Azure.
• Experience building developer platforms or internal tooling with a strong focus on developer experience.
• Experience with feature flags, configuration distribution, or audit-log infrastructure.
• Familiarity with service mesh concepts, including canary deployments, weighted routing, and traffic splitting.

In-Office Expectations

Office-assigned Stripe employees in most locations are expected to spend at least 50% of each month in their local office or with users. The expectation may vary by role, team, and location. Some Stripe Delivery Center roles, including those in Mexico City, Bengaluru, and Dublin, work 100% from the office. Some teams may also have greater in-office attendance requirements.