Jobs

Jobs

Staff Software Engineer, Stream Infrastructure

Who we are

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 Stream Infrastructure team builds and operates Stripe’s 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 Stripe’s 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 you’ll do

You’ll help define and deliver the next generation of Stripe’s Kafka-first streaming infrastructure - driving industry-level innovation to meet extremely high availability targets at global scale. Partnering with infrastructure engineers, adjacent platform teams, and the product orgs that depend on Kafka every day, you’ll set a long-term technical direction that scales with Stripe’s growth while enabling reliable, efficient operations for years to come. You’ll work on the hardest problems in operating Kafka in production - availability, resilience, performance isolation, and automated recovery - so teams across Stripe can confidently build event-driven systems on top of it.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate event-driven infrastructure with Apache Kafka at the center, alongside technologies like Temporal and AWS services
  • Partner with product and platform teams across Stripe to understand requirements, unblock Kafka adoption, and improve how streaming infrastructure is used end-to-end
  • Define and implement operational best practices (e.g., shuffle sharding, cellular architecture, load shedding, automated failover) to improve resilience and reliability at scale
  • Drive fleet-level automation and standardization (“pets” to “cattle”) through self-service workflows, safer rollouts, and self-healing systems that reduce manual operations
  • Lead initiatives that raise the bar on Kafka availability and durability (e.g., multi-region strategies, disaster recovery readiness, operational readiness reviews, incident learning)
  • Evaluate and productionize Kafka ecosystem capabilities (e.g., tiered storage, direct-to-s3) to improve cost-efficiency and scalability without compromising reliability
  • Here's some examples of recent work the team has done: 6 Nines and Tiered Storage in Production?

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

  • 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

Hybrid work at Stripe

This role is available either in an office or a remote location (35+ miles or 56+ km from a Stripe office).

In-office expectations

Office-assigned Stripes spend at least 50% of the time in a given month in their local office or with users. This hits a balance between bringing people together for in-person collaboration and learning from each other, while supporting flexibility about how to do this in a way that makes sense for individuals and their teams.

Working remotely at Stripe

A remote location is defined as being 35 miles (56 kilometers) or more from one of our offices. While you would be welcome to come into the office for team/business meetings, on-sites, meet-ups, and events, our expectation is you would regularly work from home rather than a Stripe office. Stripe does not cover the cost of relocating to a remote location. We encourage you to apply for roles that match the location where you currently live or plan to live.

Pay and benefits

The annual US base salary range for this role is $224,000 - $336,000. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Stripe and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the US may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Additional benefits for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; medical, dental, and vision benefits; and wellness stipends.

Office locations

Seattle, Toronto, or South San Francisco HQ

Remote locations

Remote in Canada, or United States

Team

Infrastructure & Corporate Tech

Job type

Full time

Apply for this role 

Please find our California applicant personal information notice here.

The application window will remain open for 100 days after the Job Post is published. However, this opportunity will remain open based on the needs of the business, which may cause the application window to close before or after the 100-day mark.

We look forward to hearing from you

At Stripe, we're looking for people with passion, grit, and integrity. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. At Stripe, we welcome diverse perspectives and people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions. Join us.