Staff Software Engineer, Stream Infrastructure

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companiesfrom the worlds largest enterprises to the most ambitious startupsuse 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 everyones reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

The Stream Infrastructure team builds and operates Stripes real-time event-driven platform that powers asynchronous communication between services and high-throughput streaming workloads across the company. We run globally distributed systems with high reliability and performance to meet Stripes scaling availability and product needs. The team operates dozens of Apache Kafka clusters with industry-leading reliability and efficiency and we continually reduce operational toil by investing in automation and self-service tooling for upgrades maintenance and day-to-day operations. The team is distributed between Seattle Toronto and remote locations.

What youll do

Youll partner with other infrastructure engineers leaders on adjacent teams as well as product engineers and managers who depend on our platform to define and deliver the next generation of Stripes streaming infrastructure. Youll help set a long-term technical direction that scales with Stripes growth while enabling reliable efficient operations for years to come.

Responsibilities

• Design build and operate event-driven infrastructure leveraging technologies like Apache Kafka Temporal and AWS services
• Collaborate with teams across Stripe to understand their requirements unblock adoption and identify opportunities to improve how streaming infrastructure is used
• Define and implement Kafka operational best practicessuch as shuffle sharding cellular architecture and load sheddingto improve resilience and reliability at scale
• Drive a shift from pets to cattle: build automation standardized workflows and self-healing systems that reduce manual operations

Who you are

Were 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

• This is a Staff-level role - that typically means 10 years of experience building operating and evolving large-scale production systems
• Experience as a technical lead for team(s) working on distributed systems including scaling them in fast-moving environments
• Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Kafka Pulsar Flink or Pinot
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy and ownership
• Growth mindset and a willingness to learn quickly explore ambiguous problem spaces and dive deep when needed
• Strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to produce clear technical documentation

Preferred qualifications

• Experience operating streaming technologies as a platform (e.g. Kafka Pulsar Flink Pinot) for internal customers at scale
• Experience building or operating control planes for managing large-scale infrastructure

Required Experience:

Staff IC