Staff Software Engineer, Storage Abstractions

Responsibilities

• 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

Who you are

Requirements

• 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.