Senior Staff Engineer, Big Data Infrastructure
Stripe · San Francsico · 8125 Core Compute · listed November 5, 2026
The shape of it
Seniority
Staff
Experience asked
12+ years
Where
Not stated
Requirements listed
6
Length
572 words
In the posting’s own words
In this role, you’d be joining the Big Data Infrastructure team. Our team builds and maintains the platforms that power data work across Stripe, managing three core layers:
What it asks for · 6
- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field
- This is a Senior Staff role, so ideally 12+ years of professional experience in a software development role
- A strong engineering background in distributed infrastructure and/or platform services, including one or more of the following: storage, databases, or compute
- Experience leading projects on a cross-team and company-wide scale, including scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime
- Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems while optimizing their reliability and security
- Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards
Also a plus
- Experience driving AI-led architectural transformations and integrating agentic workflows into large-scale data systems
- Experience in a development team at AWS, Azure, OCI, or Google
- Experience with big data infrastructure at scale, such as Spark, Iceberg, S3, Airflow, YARN, and Celeborn
- Experience with database internals and/or with Kubernetes
What the job covers
- Serve as the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, overseeing distributed systems that manage 20% of Stripe's total AWS spend
- Execute Stripe's transition to the "Agentic Era" by building invisible infrastructure that empowers AI agents to author, validate, ship, and operate data pipelines
- Drive the architecture and delivery of critical modernization bets, including YARN to Kubernetes migrations, native vectorization (Gluten/Velox), and Airflow and Data Catalog modernization
- Lead the implementation of a multi-region and multi-cloud data strategy for high availability, disaster recovery, and Azure Blob Storage compliance
- Reduce operational burden and maintenance overhead (KTLO) from over 40% to under 10% by shifting fixes into the platform instead of relying on runbooks
- Foster a culture of operational excellence and mentor engineers at various stages in their careers, up to Staff+
Degree language
- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field
Tools and skills named
Cloud & infra
- Azure3×
- AWS2×
- Distributed systems2×
- Kubernetes2×
Data
- Airflow3×
- Data pipelines2×
- Spark2×
- Data warehouse
Models & research
- Machine learning
Security & compliance
- Security
Words the posting leans on
- data15×
- experience8×
- infrastructure8×
- systems5×
- big data4×
- data infrastructure4×
- requirements4×
- scale4×
- airflow3×
- engineering3×
- internal3×
- platform3×
- agentic era2×
- agents2×
- and/or2×
- aws2×
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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