Staff Software Engineer, API Platform
Lead a team building Stripe's API Platform and service-oriented architecture as a hands-on technical leader. Requires 12+ years technical experience including 5+ years strategic leadership building developer infrastructure, APIs, frameworks or client libraries.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead a team of talented engineers, providing mentorship, guidance, and support to ensure their success
- Partner with Engineering Managers to create roadmaps that deliver milestones toward a cohesive engineering vision
- Understand user needs and pain points to prioritize engineering work and deliver high-quality solutions that meet user needs
- Drive the execution of projects, overseeing the entire development lifecycle from planning to delivery, while maintaining high standards of quality and timely completion
- Work with high-visibility teams and their stakeholders to support the Infrastructure's key engineering initiatives
- Provide hands-on technical leadership (architecture and design, vision, direction, and requirements setting, and incident response processes) for team members
- Work with leaders across the company to create and drive toward the longer term vision of Stripe's services roadmap
- Build a collaborative and inclusive work environment, promoting innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement within the team
Minimum Requirements
- 12+ years of technical experience
- 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role
- Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries (e.g., building internal or external developer products)
- Hands-on experience building infrastructure and products for internal or external customers
- Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth
- Ability to adjust conversations from high-level discussions to detailed coding
- Thrives on a high level of autonomy and responsibility
- Clear and persuasive writing and in-person communication
- Strong problem-solving skills, critical thinking, determination, and a growth mindset
- Ability to work effectively with a diverse group of people, genuinely caring for each other and contributing to a high level of psychological safety for all team members and partners
- Proficient in at least one of the programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python, Go)
Preferred Qualifications
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for different audiences (leadership, users, company-wide)
- Experience with a variety of common infrastructure platforms (databases, logging, event streams, metrics, caching, etc.)
- Experience leading partially remote and distributed teams
- Experience developing sustainable, in-house framework and abstraction ecosystems in large engineering orgs
- Experience building serverless platforms
- Experience managing rigorous incident response processes and on-call rotations
Skills
API Design, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, Databases, Logging, Event Streams, Metrics, Caching, Serverless, Infrastructure Platforms
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