Software Engineer, Secrets Infrastructure

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

We build foundational security infrastructure at scale: our certificate authority issues mTLS client certificate identities for thousands of services and engineers, and our secrets platform and libraries protect access to critical financial systems and external partners across all of Stripe’s codebases, services, and platforms. The technical challenges include building systems with 99.99%+ availability, implementing TLS workload identity and attestation logic for new platforms, and designing secret management tools that are both secure and user-friendly. Our infrastructure must be both reliable and developer-friendly—we maintain libraries in Go, Java, Ruby, and Python. As a small team responsible for critical systems, engineers take on meaningful ownership. Through collaboration with teams across Stripe, you'll build and set direction for the authentication and secrets management underpin identity in distributed systems at scale.

What it asks for · 11

• 5+ years of professional software development experience. Strong programming skills in Go, with significant experience in other similar system programming languages (C++, Rust, C#, etc) as a potential alternative.
• 3+ years of infrastructure and security experience (can overlap with other experience)
• Experience in cryptography, PKI, secret management, or other security topics
• Familiarity with infrastructure tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud platforms
• Interest in security, infrastructure, and software development
• Enthusiasm for learning new technologies and working across multiple programming languages
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills; the team maintains and troubleshoots integrations across all Stripe languages and infrastructure
• Clear verbal and written communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively with other engineers
• Experience leading cross-team projects and building alignment on multi-team technical direction
• Strong technical writing skills to write design documents
• On-call experience

Also a plus

• Prior experience building PKI or secret management infrastructure (as an SWE - not just provisioning a 3rd party tool or service)
• Experience in Java, Ruby, or Python
• Experience building developer tools, libraries, or platform services
• Experience with kubernetes internals (how the platform works, not just as a user)
• Experience operating complex services on AWS
• Experience in fully remote work environments

What the job covers

• Design and implement significant features in our certificate authority and secrets management systems
• Work across Go, Java, Ruby, and Python to implement authentication and secrets infrastructure used by every service at Stripe
• Work with with other engineering teams to understand their needs and design secrets and identity integrations
• Develop certificate provisioning and secret management integrations for various compute platforms (Kubernetes, EC2, developer workstations)
• Work on reliability improvements to maintain 99.99%+ availability for critical infrastructure; we take pride in making failure modes impossible instead of reacting to them
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical infrastructure, working alongside senior engineers to debug and resolve production issues

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• infrastructure18×
• experience14×
• secrets14×
• services9×
• platform8×
• management7×
• security6×
• systems6×
• identity5×
• tools5×
• build4×
• building4×
• critical4×
• engineers4×
• java ruby4×
• libraries4×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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