Staff Software Engineer, Storage Abstractions

Description

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.

The Storage Abstractions (STAX) team builds the software layer through which Stripe services access stored data. We own the database SDKs that hundreds of Ruby and Java services use to read and write data safely, reliably, and efficiently without needing to understand the underlying database, routing, or operational complexity.

Our work creates leverage across Stripe: by providing stable interfaces and safeguards at the storage layer, we help teams build products with confidence while enabling Stripe’s data architecture to evolve. Alongside engineers, we are designing for AI agents as customers of this foundation, making storage capabilities discoverable, interoperable, and safe to use across languages and storage backends.

Responsibilities

• As a Staff Software Engineer on STAX, you will set technical direction and lead multi-year initiatives at the intersection of developer infrastructure, data access, and AI. You will work hands-on with engineers across Stripe to make storage access simpler, safer, and more interoperable, while helping product and infrastructure teams evolve their systems without fleet-wide migrations.
• You will help turn Stripe’s AI strategy into practical developer infrastructure by treating AI agents as customers of the storage layer. This is an opportunity to build frameworks and interfaces that make complex storage operations discoverable, interoperable, and safe for both human developers and agentic workflows, while raising the quality bar for systems used throughout Stripe.
• Set technical direction for Stripe’s storage-access and lead high-impact initiatives from strategy through delivery
• Evolve storage abstractions so service teams can use consistent and reliable capabilities across languages, API versions, and storage backends
• Design stable interfaces and guardrails that improve data correctness, reliability, observability, and performance by default
• Treat AI agents as customers by building agent-accessible SDKs, frameworks, and developer workflows that enable safe, effective use of storage infrastructure
• Partner with senior leaders, engineers, product teams, and core infrastructure teams to solve cross-organizational data architecture challenges
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for technical design, execution, and operational excellence across the team

Requirements

• 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 so we're looking for 12+ years of professional software engineering experience and 5+ years leading technical strategy and delivery for complex, cross-team engineering initiatives
• Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API design, SDKs, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries (e.g., building internal or external developer products)
• Experience designing reliable distributed systems with a focus on data correctness, performance, and safe evolution of critical infrastructure
• Work designing developer infrastructure for AI or agentic workflows and helping define a technical direction for their use
• Demonstrated customer-centricity, with a track record of deeply understanding user needs and obsessing over delivering simple, reliable experiences for internal or external customers
• Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers
• Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth
• Ability to adjust conversations from high-level discussions to detailed coding
• Thrives on a high level of autonomy and responsibility
• Clear and persuasive writing and in-person communication
• Strong problem-solving skills, critical thinking, determination, and a growth mindset
• Ability to work effectively with a diverse group of people, genuinely caring for each other and contributing to a high level of psychological safety for all team members and partners
• Proficient in at least one of the programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python)
• Preferred qualifications
• Experience with MongoDB or other large-scale storage systems, such as DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, RocksDB, or relational databases
• Experience guiding adoption of a shared developer platform across a large internal engineering organization
• Experience developing observability and operational tooling that helps platform users diagnose and resolve issues
• Experience in financial technology or another environment where data correctness and reliability are especially important
• Experience influencing product and organizational decisions with senior leaders and broad stakeholder groups
• Experience leading partially remote and distributed teams
• Experience managing rigorous incident response processes and on-call rotations
• We don't expect deep expertise in every dimension above, but genuine curiosity about any of the areas that are less familiar is important to us.