Staff Software Engineer - Developer Productivity

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 Code team operates at the very foundation of Stripe’s engineering velocity. We provide the tools and services that allow every engineer at Stripe to change, review, and search code with low latency and high reliability. As stewards of Stripe’s massive monorepo, we operate at the frontiers of Git scalability, pushing the boundaries of what standard source code management systems can handle.

We are currently at a pivotal moment in our infrastructure evolution. As our monorepo scales beyond the limits of off-the-shelf enterprise solutions, we are moving further along the path of engineering deep, custom infrastructure. We don't just use Git; we patch it, modifying the internals to function at a scale few other companies experience.

Our team is responsible for a diverse and complex tech stack, ranging from high-level developer experience tooling in Ruby and Go to low-level systems programming. We are actively building custom sparse checkout tooling, rebuilding the pull request experience to support stacked diffs and modularity, and solving distributed systems problems to ensure our build and storage platforms remain performant.

This is a high-visibility role for a technologist who loves deep systems work. You won't just be supporting a platform; you will be analyzing filesystem fundamentals, profiling low-level performance, and designing the next generation of code storage to ensure Stripe’s continued growth.

What you’ll do

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain innovative next-generation or first-generation versions of solutions and products, with an emphasis on reliability, scalability and usability.

• Define and design opinionated architectural strategies, policies, and abstractions that build a long term sustainable solution for internal Stripes, that will in turn enhance the experience of millions of Stripe users.

• Diagnose and resolve nebulous performance challenges within our core infrastructure, utilizing low-level profiling and systems programming to optimize everything from filesystem interactions to upstream Git internals.

• Apply distributed systems fundamentals to architect the next generation of our code storage platform, ensuring high availability and low latency as we migrate to a massive-scale monorepo environment.

• Collaborate nimbly with cross functional partners (PM), high-visibility teams and their stakeholders to support their key initiatives - navigating various types of organizational complexity with the support of your own leadership team.

• Partner with Engineering Management, Product Manager and key leaders across the company to create and drive toward the longer term vision

• Lead and manage a team of talented engineers on the team, providing technical mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success

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

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent field 

• 10+ years of professional experience writing high quality production level code or software programs, with a focus on systems programming, operating systems fundamentals, or storage infrastructure

• Has experience building infrastructure-as-a-product with a strong focus on users needs.

• Has strong collaboration and communication skills, and can comfortably interact with both technical and non-technical participants.

• Has the curiosity to continuously learn about new technologies and business processes.

• Is energized by delivering effective, user-first solutions through creative problem-solving and collaboration.

Preferred qualifications

• Deep expertise in Git internals, object formats, and packfiles, experience building custom Source Code Management (SCM) tooling, or experience scaling large monorepos on GitHub Enterprise Server/Cloud.

• Experience with file watching services like Watchman or deep familiarity with filesystem notification technologies and fundamentals.

• Deep expertise in C or C++ systems programming, particularly in the context of large-scale infrastructure or database internals.

• Proficiency with low-level profiling, tracing, and debugging tools (e.g., perf, eBPF, or reversible debuggers like rr) to diagnose complex performance issues.

• Experience working on the backend of complex systems such as web browsers (WebKit/Chromium), databases, or high-performance computing environments.

• Familiarity with distributed systems principles, particularly in relation to storage and high-availability systems.

• Experience contributing performance patches to upstream open-source projects (Git, Linux, etc.) is a plus.