Staff Backend Engineer, Supportability Decisions

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.

Supportability sits at the vital intersection of platform safety, regulatory trust and merchant growth. Our mission is to ensure legitimate businesses can seamlessly onboard and thrive on Stripe, while proactively safeguarding the financial ecosystem from bad actors and high-risk activity.

The Supportability Decisions team is a newly forming pillar anchored in our Dublin office. In this role, you will be the foundational technical lead establishing this capability in Dublin. Our mission is to accelerate Stripe’s global expansion by building the canonical Supportability Decision Layer; a stateful distributed platform that provides unified, real-time, and explainable risk determinations to unlock fast, compliant merchant onboarding and payment method expansion worldwide.

Doing this at scale requires solving high-stakes risk challenges with precision. Deceptive merchant activity, such as transaction laundering, introduces significant threats as bad actors actively adapt to mask illicit and unsupported activities behind legitimate storefronts. Rather than relying on rigid, fragmented controls that create unnecessary friction for good users, our team builds the intelligent decision systems that systematically separate legitimate businesses from adversarial behavior, enabling Stripe to grow safely and aggressively.

As a Staff Backend Engineer and Technical Lead for Supportability Decisions, you will take ownership of defining and building this new space from the ground up. You will build systems that operate at the intersection of AI/ML, distributed data processing and real-time risk decisioning. You will tackle high-ambiguity technical challenges in an adversarial threat landscape, turning broad risk policies and operational needs into resilient, high-throughput backend services and stateful decision engines. As the technical anchor in Dublin, you will set architectural patterns, mentor engineers as the team scales from its initial members to ~7 ICs, and drive technical alignment with distributed partner teams globally.

• Lead the technical vision, system architecture and delivery of the canonical Supportability Decision Layer, establishing stateful, explainable decision APIs consumed across automated systems and human operations.
• Architect decision aggregation and AI/ML orchestration pipelines, synthesizing upstream machine learning outputs, website intelligence, backsite detection, and agentic AI evaluations into unified, low-latency determinations.
• Design high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend services that balance platform safety, regulatory compliance, and minimal friction for legitimate merchants.
• Navigate ambiguous, zero-to-one problem spaces to define clean domain models, contracts and interfaces across transaction laundering detection, web-presence screening and Local Payment Method (LPM) support.
• Build resilient, AI-assisted decision engines designed to withstand circumvention, ensuring systems maintain integrity against sophisticated bad actors who actively evolve their tactics. 
• Serve as the technical lead and mentor for the Dublin engineering team, setting architectural patterns, conducting design reviews, and raising the technical bar as the team expands.
• Partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Risk Operations, and Data Science to translate strategic risk policy into scalable technical roadmaps.
• Drive technical alignment and system integrations across global partner teams, leveraging strong written design artifacts and asynchronous collaboration to ensure cohesive platform architecture.

We're looking for a technical leader who thrives in ambiguity, has deep distributed systems instincts, and is energized by building a critical platform that enables global merchant growth while safeguarding the financial ecosystem. If that sounds like you, we encourage you to apply.

• 10+ years of professional backend software engineering experience building and maintaining complex distributed systems in production.
• Proven track record as a technical lead or staff engineer driving multi-quarter technical initiatives from ambiguous requirements to production delivery.
• Deep experience designing durable, scalable APIs, data models, and backend architectures capable of processing mission-critical data with high reliability.
• Strong communication and leadership skills with experience mentoring engineers, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, and driving technical consensus across distributed teams.
• Fluency in a modern backend language (such as Ruby, Java, Go, Python, or C++).

• Experience building systems in trust, safety, or risk domains where external bad actors actively evolve their tactics (e.g., transaction laundering, fraud, deceptive practices, or platform abuse).
• Experience architecting workflow orchestration, policy evaluation, or decision platforms that balance robust risk evaluation with frictionless merchant onboarding and product access.
• Familiarity with global payment ecosystems, Local Payment Methods (LPMs), financial partner dynamics, or card network standards.
• Background in AI/ML systems, agentic workflows, orchestrators, or integrating machine learning models into high-throughput, real-time backend decision pipelines
• Prior experience serving as an anchor or founding engineer establishing a new team or technical domain in a regional engineering hub.