Staff Engineer, Usage Based Billing

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 Stripe Billing team builds software tools that accelerate the economic and technological growth of global businesses by helping them operationalize their commercial relationship with their customers. Our product offering is a robust set of building blocks that our customers combine in creative ways to support their ever-evolving business. Our Billing platform serves as the strong foundation to support different billing models, customer acquisition channels, and ways of issuing bills and collecting payments. We also offer tools such as billing and SaaS analytics and revenue retention and recovery, designed to meet the full recurring revenue management needs of startups and large enterprises alike.

What you’ll do

We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help guide Stripe’s Usage-Based Billing product to General Availability (GA). You will work alongside our high-profile users, particularly high-growth GenAI companies, to ensure our platform supports their scale.

Reaching GA requires maturing the product across several fronts including system reliability, feature completeness, and ease of adoption. You will help architect high-throughput metering systems while simultaneously evolving our API surface. A key challenge is designing interfaces that are simple to use initially but capable of supporting our users' most advanced needs. We want to offer a straightforward developer experience that gradually reveals complexity only when necessary.

Winning in this space requires solving uniquely challenging technical problems; our systems must process billions of events per month with low latency and strong consistency. Your goal is to take the insights gained from these high-volume users and translate them into a stable, scalable, and elegant core product that defines the industry standard for usage-based billing.

Responsibilities

  • Lead technical initiatives to move Usage-Based Billing from a high-touch pilot phase to a robust, General Availability product. You will identify improvements that influence core product stability.
  • Embed with engineering teams at major AI companies to build high-leverage capabilities. You will solve their immediate scaling issues and translate those fixes into long-term product features.
  • Design high-throughput ingestion systems for high cardinality data. The backend must handle the massive usage spikes common in GenAI models.
  • Develop customization frameworks and public APIs. As we scale, interfaces must remain usable for developers building complex financial workflows.
  • Translate ambiguous user needs into technical solutions. You will provide feedback to core product teams to shape the future of Stripe’s Revenue & Financial Automation offerings.
  • Mentor senior engineers and improve engineering standards and tooling within the team.

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:

  • 10+ years of experience in software development roles.
  • A mix of backend experience (scaling, concurrency, distributed data) and product instincts (API design, user empathy, workflow definition).
  • Experience working in complex distributed systems with significant scale ("billions of events").
  • Comfortable working directly with external engineering teams. You can communicate complex technical topics clearly.
  • Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Java, Ruby, Python) and experience with big data technologies (e.g., Kafka, Flink).
  • Experience as a technical lead defining roadmaps for complex projects that span multiple teams.

Preferred requirements:

  • Experience launching a complex technical product to General Availability (GA).
  • Experience building and operating high-scale, real-time data processing systems.
  • Familiarity with the specific growth patterns and technical needs of AI companies.
  • Track record of evolving internal platforms into public-facing products.

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

South San Francisco HQ, Atlanta, New York, Seattle, or Chicago

Remote locations

Remote in United States

Team

Revenue & Financial Automation

Job type

Full time

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.