Staff Engineer, Identity

Stripe • San Francisco, NY

2d

About The Position

As a Staff Engineer on the Identity team, you will own the technical direction of one of Stripe's most strategically important product areas. This is not a role defined by task execution — it's a role defined by technical judgment, architectural influence, and the ability to turn an ambitious vision into a reliable, scalable system.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience 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).
• 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 high level of psychological safety for all team members and partner
• Has experience in a range of software languages and frameworks. Examples of what we work with include: Languages: primarily Ruby and Typescript, but also Python, Scala, Java, Go, and SQL (Spark and Trino dialects) Frameworks: React, GraphQL Kafka, Protobuf, Airflow, Bazel, Temporal, Others: Mongo, Splunk, Prometheus

Nice To Haves

• Experience with identity verification, fraud detection, or trust and safety systems — especially systems with adversarial inputs at scale
• Familiarity with ML systems in production: model serving, training pipelines, observability, drift detection, and the feedback loops that keep models accurate under adversarial conditions
• Experience building platform products with multiple consumer types — internal platform teams and external developers — where API backward compatibility and abstraction quality are first-class concerns
• Prior experience with 0-1 product builds: you've started with a blank page and ended with a production system, and you have clear opinions about what makes that process go well or poorly
• Exposure to the technical stack we work with: primarily Ruby and TypeScript on the backend and web, Python for ML and data pipelines, with infrastructure spanning Kafka, Temporal, Protobuf, React, and distributed data stores
• Experience navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving organization — you can make confident technical decisions with incomplete information and update gracefully when new constraints emerge

Responsibilities

• Own technical strategy — Define the architecture for Identity's core systems (Identity Store, headless verification platform, fraud detection infrastructure), make build-vs-buy-vs-partner decisions, and surface technical risks before they become customer-facing failures
• Lead 0-1 platform development — Architect net-new systems including the Identity Store, Networked Identity platform, and advanced fraud detection pipeline (behavioral biometrics, deepfake discriminators, adversarial training). Drive the evolution from a hosted-UI product to a headless-API and embedded-components platform
• Drive cross-functional alignment — Be the primary technical voice in roadmap and resourcing discussions. Partner with ML, product, legal, and engineering leads across Risk, Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto to ensure Identity's abstractions serve the full breadth of Stripe's product surface
• Raise the technical bar — Set engineering standards across ML, backend, mobile, and front-end; lead design reviews; and mentor senior engineers on the judgment needed to operate a high-stakes, externally-facing product
• Operate with ownership — Be accountable for reliability, scalability, and security of the systems you design — including the observability and alerting that catch model drift and fraud pattern shifts before customers do

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed