Staff Software Engineer, API Platform

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

The API Platform team is responsible for empowering teams to build highly reliable and performant services, backing our payment systems, fraud detection, and a multitude of other products. As an infrastructure team, you will build and expand the service frameworks to make complex systems easy to use, resilient, and scalable. We build powerful interfaces for engineers that depend on these systems—deployment, load balancers, web framework, databases, Kafka, and Kubernetes—while keeping them highly available and performant. We're looking for engineering leaders who drive the technical vision of Stripe's service infrastructure platform for thousands of engineers to use and build on top of, and thrive in a highly autonomous environment with many moving pieces.

What it asks for · 11

• 12+ years of technical experience
• 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role
• Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries (e.g., building internal or external developer products)
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers
• Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth
• Ability to adjust conversations from high-level discussions to detailed coding
• Thrives on a high level of autonomy and responsibility
• Clear and persuasive writing and in-person communication
• Strong problem-solving skills, critical thinking, determination, and a growth mindset
• Ability to work effectively with a diverse group of people, genuinely caring for each other and contributing to a high level of psychological safety for all team members and partners
• Proficient in at least one of the programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python, Go)

Also a plus

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for different audiences (leadership, users, company-wide)
• Experience with a variety of common infrastructure platforms (databases, logging, event streams, metrics, caching, etc.)
• Experience leading partially remote and distributed teams
• Experience developing sustainable, in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering orgs
• Experience building serverless platforms
• Experience managing rigorous incident response processes and on-call rotations

What the job covers

• Lead a team of talented engineers, providing mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success
• Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps that deliver milestones toward a cohesive engineering vision
• Understand user needs and pain points to prioritize engineering work and deliver high-quality solutions that meet user needs
• Drive the execution of projects, overseeing the entire development lifecycle from planning to delivery, while maintaining high standards of quality and timely completion
• Work with high-visibility teams and their stakeholders to support the Infrastructure's key engineering initiatives
• Provide hands-on technical leadership (architecture and design, vision, direction, and requirements setting, and incident response processes) for team members
• Work with leaders across the company to create and drive toward the longer term vision of Stripe's services roadmap
• Build a collaborative and inclusive work environment, promoting innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement within the team

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• engineering9×
• experience8×
• infrastructure8×
• build6×
• technical6×
• products5×
• requirements5×
• engineers4×
• framework4×
• highly4×
• meet4×
• platform4×
• service4×
• skills4×
• vision4×
• databases3×

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.

More open at Stripe

• Account Executive, AI Startups (Hunter)San Francisco
• Account Executive, BridgeSF, NYC, SEA, CHI
• Account Executive, Bridge (Stripe Crypto and Stablecoins)London
• Account Executive, Commercial (Grower)Chicago
• Account Executive, Commercial HunterSingapore
• Account Executive, Commercial Hunter (Japanese Fluency)Japan