Staff Engineer, Data Serving Infrastructure

Who we are

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

The group is responsible for offering data serving infrastructure spanning across data warehouse analytics, streaming analytics and search capabilities. The stack is supported by a collection of internally developed large scale distributed services and several popular open source technologies like Trino/Presto, Apache Pinot, Hive Metastore, ElasticSearch etc. The systems we own support all of the data serving needs of high scale services and thousands of individual Stripes across the company. We process hundreds of thousands of search and analytics shaped queries on petabytes of data ingested through real-time streaming and large batch ingestion pipelines. We are the data serving layer for one of the largest financial data lakes in the world.

What you’ll do

You will work as a tech lead across the data serving space and will be a key contributor to the evolution of our platform. You will directly influence how Stripe analyzes its vast and ever growing data lake. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll be empowered to make decisions with a large impact on Stripe. You will guide our investments and strategy while making our systems reliable, secure, and a delight to use. Staff Engineers at Stripe are expected and empowered to operate autonomously and are counted on to help drive Stripe forward. In this role, you will work closely and frequently with the other tech staff & senior leadership across Stripe’s data platform and have opportunities to significantly influence the overall data strategy for Stripe. We’re looking for people with a strong background and demonstrated leadership in data platform technologies.

Responsibilities

• Scope and lead large technical projects with enormous impact for Engineers & business within Stripe.
• Build and maintain the infrastructure which powers the core of Stripe.
• Scrutinize and reason clearly about the technology and architecture choices we make in building these products. In many cases, you will be the decision maker.
• Directly contribute to core interface design and write code. Serve as a role model for how great software should be written for Stripe as a whole.
• Arbitrate critical decisions correctly that fully consider software best practices, Stripe system realities, and numerous stakeholders’ preferences and concerns.
• Advise Stripe’s leadership team on key technical considerations related to data storage and access within Stripe.
• Work closely with the open source community to identify opportunities for adopting new open source features as well contribute back to the OSS.
• Work effectively cross functionally.
• Teach and mentor the next generation of technical leaders at Stripe.

Who you are

We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

• Have a strong technical background with 8+ years of experience with data platforms and backend development.
• Have experience with distributed SQL query engines like Trino, streaming systems like Kafka, Flink, Pinot, Druid,  search engines like Open Search/ElasticSearch etc.
• Have served as the technical lead for an organization and can demonstrate broad technical leadership.
• Listen well and internalize the best ideas from all over the organization while also setting a vision that others are excited to get behind.
• Work well cross-functionally and your co-workers at all levels and across all teams trust you.

Preferred qualifications

• Have been a Staff, Principal, or Distinguished Engineer at a top tier company.
• Have owned the technical roadmap for a business area.
• Are often cited as the inspiration for engineers that join your teams. Even senior engineers feel that they’re able to learn from you.