Staff Software Engineer, Stream Compute

About the role

The Stream Compute team at Stripe builds and operates the infrastructure, tooling, and systems behind our Flink-powered stream processing systems. We're at the heart of several core asynchronous workflows, operating at significant scale and handling vast amounts of sensitive financial data. Our work powers intricate processes involving various critical financial operations and real-time analytics. We run globally distributed systems with high reliability and performance to meet Stripe's scaling, availability, and product needs, and we continually reduce operational toil by investing in automation and self-service tooling for upgrades, maintenance, and day-to-day 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.).

Qualifications

• A remote location is defined as being 35 miles (56 kilometers) or more from one of our offices. While you would be welcome to come into the office for team/business meetings, on-sites, meet-ups, and events, our expectation is you would regularly work from home rather than a Stripe office.
• Stripe does not cover the cost of relocating to a remote location. We encourage you to apply for roles that match the location where you currently live or plan to live.

Pay

The annual US base salary range for this role is $224,000 - $336,000. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Stripe and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location.

Schedule

Remote in United States

Team

Infrastructure & Corporate Tech

Job type

Full time