Staff Engineer, Developer Tools

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.

The Developer Productivity group is responsible for making Stripe’s developers happy and productive. We work on tools, processes, and code refactoring to accelerate Stripe engineering as Stripe scales.

We’re looking for people with an interest in building the tools to improve the day to day experience of Engineers in Stripe. The ideal candidate will have a mix of technical expertise in either language processing tools, version control systems, contract testing, build systems, but most importantly a passion for solving developer experience problems, and a pragmatic ability to ship results iteratively. You’ll be working on a mix of fault tolerant distributed systems and also software which runs on individual developer machines.

We have a ton of important work to do, which is why we’re hiring! Our active projects change all the time, but here are a few examples of recent projects so you can get an idea of the types of work we do:

• Plan and implement multi-region availability for our CI Infrastructure! All of our systems can sustain losing machines, and making our systems even more resistant to failure is a big theme for us. If you like thinking about distributed systems, you might find a good home here!
• Design and implement industry-leading infrastructure to support contract tests. You’ll help define the features and capabilities of the system, including the generation of synthetic data where appropriate. If you like cross-functional collaboration, and solving real-world problems faced by teams striving to reach five 9s of reliability, this is the area for you!
• Build fantastic code review tools! If you love helping developers be more effective at their jobs, we have a ton of interesting projects in this area. Related projects: you could help us have better reproducible builds with Bazel and build great developer environments.
• Enhance the reliability, speed and efficiency of our largest builds. One of the key ways to execute builds efficiently is to bake incrementality into every aspect of the build process. We have accomplished a significant amount in this area, but have a long way to go! Additionally, when an incremental test run consists of a few hundred thousand tests, a handful of bad tests which randomly fail can cause a cascade of build failures. Building and enhancing the system responsible for detecting these will be critical to keep Stripe scaling!
• Enhance the ability for Engineers to test new workflows on their local machines, and in CI, by providing great support for generating Synthetic data for all services within Stripe.

• Scope and lead large technical projects with enormous impact for Engineers within Stripe.
• Design, build, and maintain the core infrastructure used by all of Stripe’s engineering teams.
• Scrutinize and reason clearly about the technology and architecture choices we make in building these products. In many cases, you will be the decider of these decisions
• Directly contribute to core interface design and write code. Serve as a role model for how great software should be written for Stripe as a whole
• Arbitrate critical decisions correctly that fully consider software best practices, Stripe system realities, and numerous stakeholders’ preferences and concerns
• Teach and mentor the next generation of technical leaders at Stripe  

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.

• 10+ years of professional hands-on software development experience  
• Hands-on experience designing and building large scale distributed systems 
• A track record of technically mentoring junior and senior engineers 

• Customer obsession, ability to articulate and represent customer experience in various forums to drive the right outcome 
• Demonstrated ability of defining & driving complex initiatives/projects across multiple teams 
• Proven success with cross-discipline and cross-team collaborations, possess strong conviction and courage skills
• Have the ability to thrive on a high level of autonomy, responsibility, and think of yourself as entrepreneurial
• Related experience in the area of Developer Tooling, CI/CD or DevOps.