Staff Software Engineer, Stream Compute

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Stream Compute team. The role involves defining and delivering the next generation of Stripe's Flink-first stream compute infrastructure, driving innovation to meet high availability targets while collaborating with various teams to improve stream processing operations.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate stream compute infrastructure with Apache Flink at the center, alongside technologies like Kafka, Temporal, and AWS services
• Partner with product and platform teams across Stripe to understand requirements, unblock Flink adoption, and improve how stream processing infrastructure is used end-to-end
• Define and implement operational best practices (e.g., shuffle sharding, cellular architecture, load shedding, automated state recovery) 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 Flink availability and state durability (e.g., multi-region strategies, disaster recovery readiness, operational readiness reviews, incident learning)
• Evaluate and productionize Flink ecosystem capabilities (e.g., SQL, connectors, state backends) to improve developer experience and scalability without compromising reliability
• Work closely with the open-source community to identify opportunities for adopting new open-source features and contributing back to OSS

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 Flink, Spark, Kafka, Pulsar, or Pinot
• Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems built with open-source tools
• Experience building and scaling infrastructure as a product
• Strong software engineering skills and a passion for big data distributed systems
• Ability to write high-quality code (in programming languages like Go, Java, Scala, etc.)
• 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
• Experience operating streaming infrastructure as a platform (e.g., Flink clusters, Kafka, Pulsar) for internal customers at scale
• Deep hands-on experience authoring, optimizing, and operating real-time processing frameworks such as Flink, Spark Streaming, Storm, or Kafka Streams in production
• Experience building or operating control planes for managing large-scale infrastructure
• Open-source contributions to data processing or big data systems (Hadoop, Spark, Celeborn, Flink, etc.)