Staff Software Engineer, Terminal Developer Productivity

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.

Stripe Terminal helps our users extend their online presence to the physical world. The Terminal team’s mission is to make it as easy for businesses to accept in-person payments as the Stripe API has done for online payments – building for Unified Commerce. With Terminal, businesses can unify their in-person and online experiences, unlocking payments use cases that are right for their business model – whether it’s creating a modern retail experience, extending their website to a pop-up store, or enabling a mobile point-of-sale at their next event.

Within Terminal, the Developer Productivity team empowers mobile, full-stack and embedded / firmware engineers to ship high-quality products quickly and safely. We build tools, processes and infrastructure that accelerate engineers across multiple teams. Our work is critical to supporting Stripe’s in-person payment products and, ultimately, to helping increase the GDP of the internet.

We own a diverse tech stack, including: build and developer productivity tooling for mobile engineers; release tooling that enables Terminal releases across SDKs, Android apps and firmware; and test automation infrastructure that helps product engineers ensure the quality and reliability of what they ship. As a Staff engineer on this team, you’ll shape the strategy and architecture of this tooling and infrastructure and drive its adoption across Terminal.

• Define the architecture and technical strategy for Terminal Developer Productivity, aligning with stakeholders and building long-term sustainable solutions that solve developer productivity challenges and increase engineering velocity
• Design, build and maintain high-quality tools, infrastructure and services, contributing hands-on through code, design documents and code reviews to ensure reliability, scalability and operational excellence
• Partner with engineering, product and central Developer Productivity teams to define and evolve the technical roadmap for Terminal Developer Productivity and translate it into executable projects with clear outcomes
• Define and track key developer productivity and reliability metrics (e.g. build times, test stability, release velocity) and drive initiatives that materially improve them
• Engage directly with internal teams to understand their workflows and pain points, gather feedback and ensure the tools and infrastructure you build meaningfully improve their day-to-day experience
• Own the operational excellence of the developer tooling stack, including reliability, incident response and continuous improvement of systems and processes
• Lead a team of technically sophisticated engineers, providing technical mentorship, elevating engineering standards and serving as a force multiplier for the team’s impact

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.

• This is a Staff-level role meaning we typically look for at least 10+ years of software engineering experience
• BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Substantial work across mobile and backend systems
• Demonstrated experience designing, building and operating scalable, resilient and observable systems across the stack
• Ability to listen well, synthesize input from across the organization and set a technical vision that others are excited to follow
• Strong bias toward simple, robust and scalable designs over unnecessary complexity
• Ability to thrive in a highly collaborative environment involving multiple stakeholders and subject matter experts
• Experience serving as the technical lead for a team of engineers, with evidence of broad technical leadership (e.g. setting direction, making tradeoffs, elevating standards)
• Proven track record of scoping and leading large, complex technical projects with significant impact across multiple teams or domains

• Proficiency in one or more of: Kotlin, Java, or Go
• Experience building tools or platforms to improve developer productivity, with clear empathy for internal developer users
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and pipelines (e.g. Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and modern build systems
• Experience designing and maintaining automated testing infrastructure (e.g. integration/end-to-end test frameworks, test orchestration, or flakiness reduction)
• Experience driving cross-team technical initiatives or standards in areas such as build, test, or release engineering