Staff Engineer - Production Eng
- Your strategic mindset helps you own complex API designs and long-term roadmaps, directly aligning with this role’s need to shape Stripe’s API future.
- You naturally thrive on autonomy and responsibility, allowing you to lead projects without constant oversight, which the job demands.
- Strong problem-solving and critical thinking ensure you can navigate both high-level vision and hands-on technical details.
- You may find the fast pace and need to balance multiple stakeholder priorities slightly overwhelming, but your focus helps you stay on track.
- Mentoring and fostering psychological safety may require deliberate effort, as you sometimes prioritize logic over team emotions.
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
Stripe is one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world, and we’re scaling in every dimension: users, revenue, people, technology, processes, and more. The Production Eng team is building the systems that support Stripe’s API. We’re looking for people passionate about distilling complexity across a breadth of problems, caring deeply about both our infrastructure and the experience of using our platform. We are major contributors to the latency, reliability, and efficiency of Stripe’s API, and you’ll be responsible for ensuring we maintain a reliable and secure platform.
What you’ll do
Production Eng is a unique environment where you’ll be working across all of Stripe’s products, and truly steering the future of Stripe’s APIs, Developer, and User Experiences, and working with world class engineers.
Responsibilities
- Lead a team of talented engineers on the team, 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/design, vision/direction/requirements setting, and incident response processes) for team members.
- Build amazing end-to-end API, developer experiences and Stripe’s public API infrastructure and tooling.
- Ensure our APIs are secure, reliable, and performant while solving product problems and building delightful API and developer experiences for our users.
- Building the future of the Stripe API and scaling Stripe’s API Infrastructure while working with product teams to extend the capabilities of our APIs.
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
- 10+ years of technical experience or 7+ years in infrastructure / platform engineering field
- 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 high level of psychological safety for all team members and partner
- Proficient in at least one of the programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python, Go).
Preferred qualifications
- 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 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.
Best personality fits for this role
Your strategic mindset helps you own complex API designs and long-term roadmaps, directly aligning with this role’s need to shape Stripe’s API future.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your natural leadership and decisiveness match the role’s requirement to steer technical vision and drive milestones.
Read the ENTJ career guide →Your leadership style is direct and efficient, aligning with the need to drive project execution and milestones.
Read the ESTJ career guide →