Staff Engineer, Identity

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.

Before Stripe, every growing internet platform had a payments team. Today, every growing internet platform has an Identity team. Identity verification has become core economic infrastructure for online businesses — enabling them to digitally verify their users' identities for fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and trust and safety purposes.

At Stripe, we're building something more ambitious than a verification product. Our vision is to build the world's most trusted store of verified identities — a single, global, reusable, risk-scored representation of every individual who interacts with Stripe and beyond. This Identity Store becomes a platform with compounding network effects: more verifications enrich the store; a richer store produces better fraud signals; better signals mean lower friction for trusted users; lower friction drives more adoption.

Our product today serves millions of verifications per month for customers like OpenAI, Shopify, and WhatNot, and powers identity verification across multiple internal Stripe products including Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto. The problems ahead — adversarial AI and deepfake defense, networked identity infrastructure, progressive verification platforms, and low friction KYC APIs — sit at the frontier of what's possible in identity engineering.

As a Staff Engineer on the Identity team, you will own the technical direction of one of Stripe's most strategically important product areas. This is not a role defined by task execution — it's a role defined by technical judgment, architectural influence, and the ability to turn an ambitious vision into a reliable, scalable system.

• Own technical strategy — Define the architecture for Identity's core systems (Identity Store, headless verification platform, fraud detection infrastructure), make build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions, and surface technical risks before they become customer-facing failures
• Lead 0-1 platform development — Architect net-new systems including the Identity Store, Networked Identity platform, and advanced fraud detection pipeline (behavioral biometrics, deepfake discriminators, adversarial training). Drive the evolution from a hosted-UI product to a headless-API and embedded-components platform
• Drive cross-functional alignment — Be the primary technical voice in roadmap and resourcing discussions. Partner with ML, product, legal, and engineering leads across Risk, Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto to ensure Identity's abstractions serve the full breadth of Stripe's product surface
• Raise the technical bar — Set engineering standards across ML, backend, mobile, and front-end; lead design reviews; and mentor senior engineers on the judgment needed to operate a high-stakes, externally-facing product
• Operate with ownership — Be accountable for reliability, scalability, and security of the systems you design — including the observability and alerting that catch model drift and fraud pattern shifts before customers do

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 software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience 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). 
• 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
• Has experience in a range of software languages and frameworks. Examples of what we work with include:
• Languages: primarily Ruby and Typescript, but also Python, Scala, Java, Go, and SQL (Spark and Trino dialects)
• Frameworks: React, GraphQL Kafka, Protobuf, Airflow, Bazel, Temporal, 
• Others: Mongo, Splunk, Prometheus

• Experience with identity verification, fraud detection, or trust and safety systems — especially systems with adversarial inputs at scale
• Familiarity with ML systems in production: model serving, training pipelines, observability, drift detection, and the feedback loops that keep models accurate under adversarial conditions
• Experience building platform products with multiple consumer types — internal platform teams and external developers — where API backward compatibility and abstraction quality are first-class concerns
• Prior experience with 0-1 product builds: you've started with a blank page and ended with a production system, and you have clear opinions about what makes that process go well or poorly
• Exposure to the technical stack we work with: primarily Ruby and TypeScript on the backend and web, Python for ML and data pipelines, with infrastructure spanning Kafka, Temporal, Protobuf, React, and distributed data stores
• Experience navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving organization — you can make confident technical decisions with incomplete information and update gracefully when new constraints emerge

• The market is at an inflection point. The global identity verification market is growing at ~15% CAGR, from $12.5B in 2024 to $21.8B by 2028. Competitors have more features today — but none of them have Stripe's moat: payments signals, fraud network, consumer graph, and KYC data spanning the full financial ecosystem. We're building to win the next decade, not the last one.
• The problems are genuinely hard. Adversarial ML against deepfakes and face swaps. Distributed identity graph architecture with real-time freshness requirements. Progressive verification APIs that minimize friction without sacrificing fraud detection accuracy. These are unsolved problems — not just at Stripe, but in the industry.
• You'll work on systems that matter immediately. The verifications we run protect real users from real fraud. When our recall improves by 10 points, that's millions of dollars in prevented fraud losses for customers who rely on us. When our mobile SDK completion rate rises, thousands more legitimate users successfully onboard each month.
• The team is small enough that your judgment shapes the architecture. This isn't a role where you inherit decisions made five years ago. It's a role where the decisions you make in 2026 are the ones the team will build on through 2029.