Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Stripe Assistant

Stripe • San Francisco, CA

14h

About The Position

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer on the Stripe Assistant team, you’ll own the end-to-end ML and agent architecture that makes Stripe Assistant safe, reliable, and deeply useful. You’ll set the strategy for how the Assistant executes high-trust actions, delivers accurate analytical answers across Stripe and the broader web, orchestrates capabilities across many tools and agents, and grounds responses in authoritative Stripe and user data—so users can resolve issues quickly and confidently. You’ll drive conversation continuity and personalization across surfaces, evolve the Assistant into a proactive partner that anticipates user needs, and deepen its presence in the dashboard to streamline critical workflows. You’ll establish rigorous evaluation and SLOs and deliver step‑change improvements in quality, latency, cost, and availability—paving the way for configurable levels of autonomy and, ultimately, a dependable operating layer over a merchant’s Stripe account.

Requirements

• 8+ years in AI/ML and backend engineering (4+ years building and operating production ML systems) with technical leadership.
• Deep and up-to-date applied LLM experience: RAG/embeddings, tool use/function calling, agentic planning/orchestration, fine-tuning, code generation, evaluations, etc.
• Proficient in Python (Ruby is a plus); strong distributed systems fundamentals.
• Experience working closely with product management, design, other engineers, and other cross-functional partners.

Nice To Haves

• Experience operating ML systems at global scale with stringent SLOs—balancing reliability, latency, and cost—with privacy, security, and compliance by design.
• Experience building products where AI/ML is core; as well as balancing short-term product priorities with long-term AI/ML improvements.
• Track record building ML platforms, especially those that enable multiple teams to collaborate together.
• Strong technical leadership and communication: mentoring and elevating engineers, elevating AI/ML awareness and posture within organizations, setting architectural direction, and driving alignment in ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Establish trustworthy, human-in-the-loop execution for high-trust "write" actions—prioritizing user control, transparency, accountability, and auditability so customers can delegate with confidence.
• Define and evolve the Assistant’s capability and governance model across hundreds of tools and agents, balancing power, permissions, and consistency at scale.
• Raise answer quality and usefulness by grounding in authoritative Stripe knowledge and live user data, building cross-surface memory and personalization, and making the Assistant proactive and present in the dashboard.
• Explore and apply optimal machine learning methods to improve Stripe Assistant’s overall performance, including but not limited to fine-tuning LLMs with RLHF, synthetic data generation, optimizing RAG pipelines via domain‑specific embedding and retriever fine‑tuning, and automatic prompt tuning, etc.
• Make quality and reliability a product: set and meet SLOs, build rigorous evaluation and benchmarking loops, and drive sustained improvements in latency, cost, and availability.
• Lead as a tech lead: mentor and grow engineers, uphold high bars for code quality, security, observability, and operational rigor, and align cross‑functionally to ship safely and fast.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees