Staff Backend Engineer - CI Services

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 Developer Productivity group is responsible for making Stripe’s developers happy and productive. We work on tools, processes, and code refactoring to accelerate Stripe engineering as Stripe scales.

We’re looking for people with an interest in building the tools to improve the day to day experience of Engineers in Stripe. The ideal candidate will have a passion for solving developer experience problems, and a pragmatic ability to ship results iteratively—powered by a mix of technical expertise across some or all of: language processing tools; version control systems; build systems; and distributed systems engineering. You’ll be working on a mix of engineer-facing systems, CI infrastructure platforms, and big-data engineering.

What you’ll do

We have a ton of important work to do, which is why we’re hiring! Our active projects change all the time, but here are a few examples of recent projects so you can get an idea of the types of work we do:

• Build and manage systems to handle CI at massive scale—including batching, speculative stacking, merge-race inhibition, and more.
• Build and manage systems to handle our enormous CI test suite–identifying and managing flaky tests, assessing and reproducing flakiness, and optimizing for test effectiveness.
• Enhance our CI systems for reliability, including adaptive response to available capacity, resilience and self-recovery from outages, and highly-leveraged observability.
• Detect and isolate code breakages to minimize their blast radius.
• Work directly with product engineers to understand and deliver their productivity needs.

Responsibilities

• Scope and lead large technical projects with enormous impact for engineers within Stripe.
• Design, build, and maintain the core CI systems used by all of Stripe’s engineering teams.
• Scrutinize and reason clearly about the technology and architecture choices we make in building these products. In many cases, you will be the owner of these decisions.
• Directly contribute to core interface design and write code. Serve as a role model for how great software should be written for Stripe as a whole.
• Arbitrate critical decisions correctly that fully consider software best practices, Stripe system realities, and numerous stakeholders’ preferences and concerns.
• Teach and mentor the next generation of technical leaders at Stripe.
• Drive the effective and highly-leveraged use of AI-assisted implementation, ops, and delivery 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 professional hands-on software development experience  
• Hands-on experience designing and building large scale distributed systems 
• A track record of technically mentoring junior and senior engineers 

Preferred qualifications

• Customer obsession, ability to articulate and represent customer experience in various forums to drive the right outcome 
• Demonstrated ability of defining & driving complex initiatives/projects across multiple teams 
• Proven success with cross-discipline and cross-team collaborations, possess strong conviction and courage skills
• Have the ability to thrive on a high level of autonomy, responsibility, and think of yourself as entrepreneurial
• Related experience in the area of Developer Tooling, CI/CD or DevOps.