Engineer, Backend

Backend engineers build the core of Stripe products, services and APIs in spectacularly robust fashion.

As a platform company powering businesses all over the world, Stripe processes payments, runs marketplaces, detects fraud, helps entrepreneurs start an internet business from anywhere in the world, builds world-class developer-friendly APIs, and more. Stripe’s backend engineers work on the business logic for all of that. As a backend engineer, you will build and expand APIs and services and work with our partners to launch new markets,payment methods, and capabilities.

We have backend engineers in almost every team across Stripe, and in that role, you’ll be making some of the most significant decisions for the company. You’ll get to work with other engineers to build delightful features that span various parts of the system, as well as our business, sales and operations teams to understand and solve our users’ pain points.

We’re looking for people with strong background or interest in building successful products or systems; you’re comfortable in dealing with lots of moving pieces; you have exquisite attention to detail; and you’re comfortable learning new technologies and systems.

You will:

• Design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and systems across Stripe’s engineering teams
• Debug production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack
• Work with engineers across the company to build new features at large-scale
• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes

You may be fit for this role if you:

• Enjoy and have experience building APIs
• Think about systems and services and write high quality code. We work mostly in Ruby, with some Scala and Go. However, languages can be learned: we care much more about your general engineering skill than knowledge of a particular language or framework.
• Hold yourself and others to a high bar when working with production systems
• Take pride in working on projects to successful completion involving a wide variety of technologies and systems.
• Thrive in a collaborative environment involving different stakeholders and subject matter experts
• Enjoy working with a diverse group of people with different expertise (for example, ¼ of Stripes work in a country that’s different from the one they grew up in). Almost every role at Stripe collaborates with some engineers, from Sales and Support in sharing feedback from our customers; to Legal and Accounting in supporting our systems for tracking money movement and reporting around the world.

It’s not expected that any single candidate would have expertise across all of these areas. For instance, we have wonderful team members who are really focused on their customers’ needs and building amazing user experiences, but didn’t work on APIs before joining Stripe.

You might work on:

• Build a new API for our users, or iterate on existing APIs
• Launch a new market or payment method
• Work with our Analytics and Fraud teams to reduce chargebacks and declines
• Build new tools for our business teams
• Build new systems to securely store sensitive data

What’s it like to work at Stripe?Stripe is helping the internet fulfill its potential as a platform for economic progress by building software tools that accelerate global economic access and technological development. Stripe makes it easy to start, run and scale an internet business from anywhere in the world.  Stripe is, at its heart, an engineering company. To provide a missing pillar of core internet infrastructure, we hire people with a broad set of technical skills (and from a wide variety of backgrounds) who are ready to take on some of the most challenging problems in the industry -- from reliably handling 100M API requests per day, to building adaptive machine learning as a result of years of data science and infrastructure work, and enabling entrepreneurs worldwide to start a global internet business. We look at Stripe as a constant work in progress and the same is true of our people; for all of us, we believe the best is yet to come. We're here to support each other in our curiosity and creativity -- which we pursue through thoughtful discussion and knowledge-sharing among a diverse set of peers and colleagues. We encourage all engineers to transition teams once every year and a half and also take on short-term projects with other teams across Stripe. This enables engineers to learn how different parts of Stripe work while also establishing stronger ties and cross-pollination between groups. We contribute to existing open-source projects and the people working on them, and we release several tools as open-source. We want to work in a company of warm, inclusive people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. The kind of people who are committed to going out of their way to help other Stripes in the short-term and pushing them to improve over the long-term (by helping them to get better at what they do).  We’re a highly cross-functional organization and view that as part of the fun: we design our space to encourage as much collaboration as possible. We have long tables in the kitchen for a reason (to enable everyone to meet new people and learn from them). We also have a culture of transparency that we carry through to email communication, ensuring that Stripes all around the world have the information they need to make good local decisions.  In both our products and our people, we aim to reflect, represent and advocate for all of our users, globally. Our users transcend geography, culture and language; what we share, collectively, is a drive to create a fairer, more economically interconnected world.  Our shipping culture How we recruit Guide to the onsite interview (PDF)