Staff Backend Engineer - UI Platform
- Your strong commitment to team harmony and supporting colleagues makes you an excellent mentor.
- You are organized and reliable, which helps in coordinating cross-team efforts and maintaining steady progress.
- The role requires independent technical decision-making and strategic vision, which may be less natural.
- You might struggle with the fast-paced, high-stakes environment and the need for tough technical tradeoffs.
Who we are
About Stripe
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 UI Platform team, known as Sail, builds the foundations that support Stripe’s Dashboard and many of Stripe’s other user interfaces. The Sail Services team provides backend-for-frontend services that help product teams build consistent, scalable user experiences.
The team is defining its mission, roadmap, and technical vision as the UI platform takes on a more central role in how Stripe builds user interfaces. We work with engineers, product managers, and designers across Stripe to connect the design system, software development kits, and backend services into a consistent, surprisingly delightful user experience.
What you’ll do
As a Staff Software Engineer on the UI Platform team, you’ll help shape the technical direction for the services that support Stripe’s user interfaces. You’ll combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership, working with backend engineers and cross-functional partners to deliver platform capabilities that help Stripe build consistent, reliable user experiences.
Responsibilities
- Define a cross-team technical strategy, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for the backend services that power Stripe’s merchant-facing experiences
- Lead the design and delivery of scalable backend services that give product teams a consistent foundation for building reliable user experiences across the Dashboard, mobile applications, and other interfaces
- Build reusable platform capabilities that help product teams develop, operate, and improve their products with confidence
- Partner with engineers, product managers, and designers to connect the design system, software development kits, APIs, and backend services
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and mentorship, raising the quality and effectiveness of the team’s work
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
- This is a staff-level role, which typically means 10+ years of experience building complex, reliable, scalable APIs or distributed systems
- Track record of leading the technical design and delivery of large projects across multiple engineering teams
- Experience setting technical direction and translating strategy into an executable roadmap
- Demonstrated ability to communicate technical decisions and tradeoffs with engineering, cross-functional partners, and senior leadership
Preferred qualifications
- Experience building backend-for-frontend systems or frontend platform services
- Experience working on developer platforms, design systems, or UI infrastructure
- Experience using agentic development workflows to improve engineering productivity
- Experience with feature flagging, experimentation, telemetry, or analytics systems
Best personality fits for this role
Your strategic mindset helps you define multi-year roadmaps and technical visions, which is central to this role.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your natural leadership and goal-orientation align with driving the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for the backend.
Read the ENTJ career guide →Your deep analytical thinking is ideal for designing complex backend services and solving distributed systems problems.
Read the INTP career guide →