Senior Staff Engineer, Big Data Infrastructure

Stripe • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Stripe is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to serve as the technical leader for its Big Data Infrastructure organization. The role guides a 40+ person engineering team responsible for foundational data systems used by more than 2,000 engineers and 600+ internal teams. These systems process workloads growing organically by over 30% year over year, manage more than 800 PB of data, run 325,000 applications daily, and support critical pipelines including inbound payments, network reconciliation, and capital underwriting.

The team builds and maintains data orchestration, batch compute, and data lake platforms, including Airflow, Spark, Celeborn, Iceberg, Hive, S3, and Azure Blob Storage. The Senior Staff Engineer will partner with internal customers such as Data Foundations, Payins Engineering, and AI/ML Foundations to modernize the technology stack and advance Stripe's transition to AI-agent-operated data pipelines.

Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field.
• Ideally 12+ years of professional experience in a software development role.
• Strong engineering background in distributed infrastructure and/or platform services, including one or more of storage, databases, or compute.
• Experience leading cross-team and company-wide projects, including scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime.
• Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems while optimizing reliability and security.
• Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards.

Nice To Haves

• Experience driving AI-led architectural transformations and integrating agentic workflows into large-scale data systems.
• Experience on a development team at AWS, Azure, OCI, or Google.
• Experience with big data infrastructure at scale, such as Spark, Iceberg, S3, Airflow, YARN, and Celeborn.
• Experience with database internals and/or Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, overseeing distributed systems that manage 20% of Stripe's total AWS spend.
• Build infrastructure that enables AI agents to author, validate, ship, and operate data pipelines.
• Drive the architecture and delivery of modernization initiatives, including migrations from YARN to Kubernetes, native vectorization with Gluten/Velox, and modernization of Airflow and the Data Catalog.
• Lead implementation of a multi-region and multi-cloud data strategy for high availability, disaster recovery, and Azure Blob Storage compliance.
• Reduce operational burden and maintenance overhead (KTLO) from over 40% to under 10% by shifting fixes into the platform instead of relying on runbooks.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence and mentor engineers at various career stages, up to Staff+.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior