Staff Engineer, Payments

Role overview

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 Payments is at the core of Stripe’s mission to increase the GDP of the internet. As we expand our payments footprint in India, we are looking for a Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for our next generation of payment offerings in the market. As a Staff Engineer on the India Payments team, you will build on Stripe’s foundational platforms and lead the architectural evolution of critical systems that process money movement every millisecond. Working across the payments stack, you will shape how we integrate with local payment rails, initiate and intelligently route payments, ensure reliable completion and automate reconciliation and settlement. Partnering with engineering teams, cross-functional partners and leaders globally, you will solve complex, high-stakes technical challenges involving low-latency execution, transactional correctness and idempotency, safe migrations with zero downtime and resilient distributed-state management. What you’ll do Responsibilities • Design, build and operate secure, reliable and extensible production systems. • Drive complex initiatives from concept to launch by managing dependencies, making decisive architectural trade-offs and ensuring successful delivery. • Set a high technical bar through hands-on coding, design and code reviews, rigorous testing, clear documentation and maintainable system design. • Partner with cross-functional teams and external partners to navigate regulatory and operational complexity, unblock execution and deliver roadmap commitments. • Own operational excellence by leading incident response and continuously improving system health, security and operational workflows. • Improve engineering standards, tooling and processes. • Mentor and develop engineers to cultivate the next generation of leaders at Stripe. 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 • 10+ years of hands-on experience building and operating highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems. • Proven experience driving the architectural vision for complex, multi-team initiatives, backed by deep expertise in system design, databases and API development. • Strong track record of end-to-end technical ownership, steering projects from concept to delivery while proactively influencing both technical and product roadmaps. • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to distill highly complex technical concepts for diverse, non-technical audiences. • A highly collaborative mindset, valuing diverse perspectives and thriving across functional and organizational boundaries. • Deep user empathy, consistently applying a customer-centric lens to problem-solving and product development. Preferred qualifications • Experience in the payments or financial technology industry is a plus, though not required. • Experience leading projects across multiple cross-functional teams and timezones. • Proficiency in Ruby, Java, or Go, with experience working with relational and document databases