Webscale Jobs | Staff Engineer, Document Databases at Stripe

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

As part of the Document Databases team, we provide a tier-0 real-time database infrastructure based on MongoDB to enable all of Stripe’s business and infrastructure. We store nearly all of Stripe’s online data and have strict requirements for security, durability, availability, latency, and scalability. We have a huge responsibility as we contribute to Stripe’s overall user experience. Our mission is to provide a simple, secure, reliable, scalable, and performant document databases as a service to enable teams at Stripe. We run a massive fleet of databases and a large-scale distributed system to manage the fleet. We are growing very fast which is challenging us to rethink our assumptions.

What you’ll do

We are building the next generation of document-based database infrastructure to enable the next phase of Stripe’s growth. We are looking for a Staff engineer who thrives at solving hard problems in distributed systems and databases. The ideal candidate is excited about database technology, eager to solve challenging distributed systems problems, and to partner with other Stripe engineering teams to establish empathy and understand their use-cases. This is a great opportunity to have tremendous impact across Stripe.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain the core database infrastructure used by all of Stripe’s engineering teams
Solve complicated problems that only exist at very high scale
Debug production issues across services and levels of the stack
Plan for the growth of Stripe’s database platform infrastructure
Develop tooling and automate processes to provide a resilient and flexible platform for other engineers
Build a great customer experience for people using your infrastructure
To get a concrete idea of what projects you might work on here, see the “Projects you could work on” section

Projects You Could Work On

Design and build data sharding mechanisms and infrastructure to enable Stripe’s growth over the next 10 years
Implement dynamic capacity management and rate limiting infrastructure to keep systems healthy during 10x load events
Build storage tiering and admission control systems to enforce balance between performance and efficiency
Create tools and APIs that engineers love to use to understand the performance of and optimize their database queries

Who you are

We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

10+ years of professional experience in a software development role
Proven track record of building large scale, cloud based complex distributed systems; identifying shortcomings and optimization opportunities; and making data driven cost performance tradeoffs to influence design decisions
Experience building and operating infrastructure and tools that empower developers/product teams to deliver business value
Experience leading and creating strong technical teams that balance operational excellence, collaboration and user needs
Experience with operational excellence and a deep understanding of metrics, alarms and dashboards
Experience handling critical incidents for production systems

Preferred qualifications

Experience on building large scale distributed systems in AWS
Experience working with Distributed storage services like AWS DynamoDB
Experience with Go, Ruby or/and Java
Proven track record of building large scale, cloud based complex distributed systems; identifying shortcomings and optimization opportunities; and making data driven cost performance tradeoffs to influence design decisions

We have a ton of important work to do, which is why we’re hiring! Our projects are of course changing all the time, but here are a few projects either that we’ve done in the past or are upcoming, so you can get an idea of the types of work we do. Technologies we use include: Golang, Ruby, MongoDB, MySQL, Vitess, Envoy, Kafka, and others.

Hybrid work at Stripe

This role is available either in an office or a remote location (typically, 35+ miles or 56+ km from a Stripe office).

Office-assigned Stripes spend at least 50% of the time in a given month in their local office or with users. This hits a balance between bringing people together for in-person collaboration and learning from each other, while supporting flexibility about how to do this in a way that makes sense for individuals and their teams.

A remote location, in most cases, is defined as being 35 miles (56 kilometers) or more from one of our offices. While you would be welcome to come into the office for team/business meetings, on-sites, meet-ups, and events, our expectation is you would regularly work from home rather than a Stripe office. Stripe does not cover the cost of relocating to a remote location. We encourage you to apply for roles that match the location where you currently or plan to live.

Pay and benefits

The annual US base salary range for this role is $209,800 - $314,800. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Stripe and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the US may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Additional benefits for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; medical, dental, and vision benefits; and wellness stipends.