Staff Software Engineer, Startup Products

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, and its Startup Products team builds products that help founders start and run companies. The Staff Software Engineer will shape technical strategy and lead major 0→1 products from exploration through launch and iteration, while building reliable services, APIs, user experiences, and integrations for complex legal, financial, and operational workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive technical strategy across Startup Products, connecting near-term product delivery to a cohesive, durable engineering vision
• Lead large, ambiguous 0→1 initiatives from problem definition and architecture through implementation, safe launch, and iteration
• Design, build, and maintain polished user experiences, reliable backend services, APIs, and systems
• Identify technical risks, dependencies, and foundational investments early, creating incremental plans that de-risk the roadmap and accelerate future work
• Partner with engineering teams across Stripe, building alignment and influencing their roadmaps and priorities when Startup Products depends on shared capabilities
• Work directly with founders to understand their needs and translate complex legal, financial, and operational workflows into intuitive products
• Raise the team’s engineering bar through clear standards, strong documentation, mentoring, and constructive technical feedback
• Advise product and engineering leadership on emerging opportunities, technical constraints, and investments needed to support the team’s long-term ambitions

Requirements:

• • 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of owning large, ambiguous systems end-to-end
• • Demonstrated experience defining and delivering large, ambiguous software initiatives from early product and technical exploration through production launch
• • Strong full-stack engineering skills, including experience building reliable backend services and polished user-facing product experiences
• • Ability to create technical direction and align teams with different priorities and constraints without relying on direct authority
• • Product-minded engineering judgment, with a deep commitment to understanding users and delivering meaningful outcomes for them and the business
• • Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to move between strategic discussions and detailed technical decisions
• • A high quality bar and attention to detail across product experience, implementation, reliability, and operational readiness
• • Experience with early stage startups and a deep understanding of the challenges founders face all over the world
• • Experience building 0→1 products and taking them from concept through launch and iteration
• • Experience building products involving legal, financial, compliance, or other complex and high-trust workflows
• • Experience building AI-powered product experiences or platforms that safely automate consequential user tasks
• • Experience with Ruby, and/or TypeScript. We care more about strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn than expertise in a particular language or framework