Staff Engineer, Data Serving Infrastructure

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 team is responsible for offering data serving infrastructure capabilities for Stripe and the stack is supported by a collection of internally developed services and several popular open source technologies like Trino/Presto, Hive Metastore, etc. The systems we own support all of the data warehouse workloads initiated by both services and by individual Stripes across the company to support various business analytics use cases. We process hundreds of thousands of queries on petabytes of data per day and form the key data serving layer for one of the largest financial data lakes in the world. The team is distributed across USA and Canada.

What you’ll do

You will work as a Technical lead for the data warehouse analytics space and will be a key contributor to the evolution of our platform. You will directly influence how Stripe analyzes its vast and ever growing data lake. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll be empowered to make decisions with a large impact on Stripe. You will guide our investments and strategy while making our systems reliable, secure, and a delight to use. Staff Engineers at Stripe are expected and empowered to operate autonomously and are counted on to help drive Stripe forward. In this role, you will work closely and frequently with the other tech staff & senior leadership across Stripe’s data platform and have opportunities to significantly influence the overall data strategy for Stripe. We’re looking for people with a strong background and demonstrated leadership in data platform technologies. 

Responsibilities:

• Scope and lead large technical projects with enormous impact for Engineers & business within Stripe.
• Build and maintain the infrastructure which powers the core of Stripe.
• Scrutinize and reason clearly about the technology and architecture choices we make in building these products. In many cases, you will be the decision maker.
• 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.
• Advise Stripe’s leadership team on key technical considerations related to data storage and access within Stripe.
• Work closely with the open source community to identify opportunities for adopting new open source features as well contribute back to the OSS.
• Work effectively cross functionally.
• Teach and mentor the next generation of technical leaders at Stripe.

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

• Strong technical background with 10+ years of experience in data platforms, distributed systems, and backend development.
• Experience using, operating and optimizing distributed SQL query engines like Trino/Presto
• Experience managing and scaling data warehouse systems like Hive Metastore or AWS Glue Data Catalog.
• Experience with data lake architectures and hands-on experience with data lake open table formats such as Parquet, Iceberg, Delta lake, Hudi, etc.
• Strong programming skills in at least one JVM language (Java, Scala) and proficiency in SQL. Experience with Golang or Python is a plus.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and experience in troubleshooting complex distributed systems.
• Track record of serving as a technical lead, with the ability to provide technical direction and mentor team members.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally, collaborating effectively with data engineers, data scientists, and business stakeholders.
• Ability to listen and synthesize ideas from across the organization while setting a compelling technical vision.

Preferred qualifications

• Have been a Staff, Principal, or Distinguished Engineer at a top tier company.
• Have owned the technical roadmap for a business area.
• Are often cited as the inspiration for engineers that join your teams. Even senior engineers feel that they’re able to learn from you.