Backend Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering
Seattle, WASan Francisco, CAHybrid5+ YOE
Summary
Backend engineer on forward deployed team working with AI agents and enterprise users to solve complex payments/billing issues, build scalable platform solutions, and influence product roadmap. Requires 5+ years backend experience, distributed systems expertise, and user-facing collaboration.
About the role
What you’ll do
As an Engineer on the RFA Forward Deployed Engineering team, you will:
- Work alongside AI agents to serve users at scale. AI agents maintain real-time integration maps, run shadow tests, and perform automated state reconciliation. Focus on engineering judgment, user relationships, product decisions, and shaping tooling.
- Engage directly with users. Work with strategic enterprise users on revenue, billing, and payments requirements. Translate into technical solutions and inform product teams.
- Build across product boundaries. Design and deploy solutions across Payments, Invoicing, Billing, and Global LPMs. Embed with product teams.
- Build reusable solutions, not one-off fixes. Contribute to customization frameworks for billing logic, financial workflows, and integrations.
- Provide architectural guidance. Review architectures, advise on best practices, and optimize for enterprise environments.
- Resolve critical technical challenges. Diagnose and fix issues across the stack, identify systemic improvements.
- Inform the product roadmap. Advocate for user needs based on direct experience.
- Raise the bar on engineering. Improve standards, tooling, and processes.
Who you are
Strong backend engineer who thinks like a product person, comfortable with ambiguity, prefers talking to users.
Minimum requirements
- 5+ years of experience in software engineering, strong focus on backend systems.
- Proven ability to design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable, secure systems.
- Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and data modeling.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to grasp complex domains.
- Clear communicator with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including users.
- Track record in collaborative environments.
- Willingness to engage directly with users.
- Willingness to travel (~20-30%) to Stripe sites (Toronto, SF, Seattle) and user locations.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with financial automation or billing products (e.g., Stripe Billing, Tax, Revenue Recognition).
- Experience with multi-product integration.
- Familiarity with extensibility models or platform development.
- Experience with large enterprise users or customer-facing engineering.
- Experience in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.
- Interest in AI-augmented engineering.
Skills
distributed systemsAPI designdata modelingbackend systemsStripe Billingfinancial automationKubernetesPostgreSQLAWSPython