Staff Engineer, Usage Based Billing

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

The Stripe Billing team builds software tools that accelerate the economic and technological growth of global businesses by helping them operationalize their commercial relationship with their customers. Our product offering is a robust set of building blocks that our customers combine in creative ways to support their ever-evolving business. Our Billing platform serves as the strong foundation to support different billing models, customer acquisition channels, and ways of issuing bills and collecting payments. We also offer tools such as billing and SaaS analytics and revenue retention and recovery, designed to meet the full recurring revenue management needs of startups and large enterprises alike. 

What you’ll do

We’re looking for an experienced Staff Backend Engineer to join our team and lead initiatives focused on establishing Stripe Billing as the go-to billing platform for high-growth, innovative GenAI companies. In this role, you will be responsible for architecting and building transformative usage-based billing functionality, including a high-throughput usage ingestion system that consumes and processes billions of events per month, real-time credit drawdown systems, and industry-leading risk management tools that allow GenAI innovators to scale with confidence. Winning in this space requires solving uniquely challenging technical problems; our systems process large volumes of high cardinality data with low latency and strong consistency to power downstream billing systems. We’re looking for a strong technical leader who is passionate about solving hard technical problems in the context of complex, high scale, distributed systems. This is your chance to shape the future of how the next generation of startups and enterprises manage their revenue. 

You will:

• Lead by example in designing, building, and operating scalable and reliable usage-based billing functionality. 
• Drive architecture and technical breakdown discussions, both within and across teams.
• Partner closely with engineering and product leadership to define our technical strategy.
• Make effective tradeoffs that consider business priorities, user experience, and a sustainable technical foundation.
• Develop and lead execution against both short-term and long-term roadmaps.
• Identify and prioritize investments to continuously improve reliability and performance.
• Work closely with platform teams across Stripe to align on technical dependencies and unblock long-term roadmap delivery. 
• Work in a variety of languages and technologies, including Java, Ruby, Kafka, Flink, and Pinot.
• Mentor and coach individual contributors to become the next generation of leaders at Stripe.

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 experience in full time software development roles.
• You have extensive experience working in complex distributed systems with significant scale and reliability requirements.
• You have proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Java, Ruby, Python).
• You have experience with big data technologies (e.g. Flink, Kafka, Pinot, Iceberg) and a solid understanding of data modeling and database systems.
• You have experience with building and operating high scale, real-time data processing systems using technologies like time series databases and Flink.
• You are self-directed and can operate autonomously across multiple teams to deliver scaled impact.
• You have experience as a technical lead, including defining the roadmap for complex projects spanning multiple teams and functions.
• You have experience mentoring and growing senior engineers.

Preferred requirements:

• You have experience evaluating and optimizing data storage solutions to balance long-term trade offs between cost and performance.