Staff Engineer, Compute Foundation

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 The Compute Foundation group builds and operates the core systems that enable every Stripe engineer to ship code, configuration, and infrastructure changes safely and at high velocity. Embedded on the Imaging team, you will design, build, and distribute Linux machine images; manage host bootstrapping and OS-configuration systems; oversee OS packages and security-patching infrastructure; and provide platforms that empower service teams to safely run workloads across cloud providers and regions. What you’ll do Own the foundation of Stripe’s compute fleet: Stripe’s services rely on host infrastructure that boots reliably, receives accurate configurations, and operates safely. Your decisions will directly shape the base operating system, package ecosystems, security posture, and bootstrap behavior of Stripe’s fleet. Lead active architectural transformations: The team is driving key platform evolutions, including modernizing the OS configuration layer, containerizing workloads, scaling machine image distribution across multi-cloud regions, and streamlining OS upgrades and critical security patching. Drive broad, end-to-end host lifecycle ownership: Work across the entire host lifecycle - from image construction, package distribution, kernel and OS configuration, early boot/systemd, storage, networking initialization, and workload readiness. You will tackle complex engineering challenges that balance reliability, security, compliance, developer experience, and performance. Your judgment prevents fleetwide incidents: Changes to machine images, packages, kernels, bootstrap systems, and host configuration can have broad consequences. You will design validation, canarying, rollout, health-evaluation, and rollback mechanisms that contain blast radius and make foundational infrastructure changes safer. Agency to shape technical strategy: As a Staff engineer, you will set technical direction for the team’s systems, author designs that span multiple teams, mentor engineers and be the person engineering managers and engineers rely on for the technical north-star. Responsibilities • Lead large, ambiguous infrastructure projects from initial design through production launch, broad adoption, and long-term operation. Define the architecture and success criteria, sequence the work, resolve technical ambiguity, coordinate cross-team dependencies, and shepherd projects to measurable impact. • Set technical direction for the evolution of Stripe’s host infrastructure, including how machine images are built, validated, distributed, and operated. Guide thoughtful decisions about when to containerize workloads and when host-based approaches remain appropriate. • Design systems and practices that make broad infrastructure changes safe and predictable. Establish strong validation, staged rollout, observability, and rollback capabilities. Build guardrails that prevent unhealthy changes from progressing and give operators clear, actionable information when failures occur. • Lead incident response for the systems the team owns. Systematically reduce operational toil and make reliability, security, debuggability, and maintainability first-class properties of the platform. • Partner with technical leaders across infrastructure, security, compliance, and service teams to represent the Imaging team’s perspective and align on shared technical direction. Build strong relationships with partner teams and lead work that crosses organizational and system boundaries. • Lead critical design reviews and establish standards for the safety, reliability, operability, and usability of Stripe’s host infrastructure. Mentor senior engineers through high-stakes architectural decisions. Raise the quality of designs and implementations through hands-on coding, code review, debugging, and operational leadership. 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 software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of designing and shipping production infrastructure systems of significant scale and complexity. • Proven ability to lead large, ambiguous infrastructure projects end-to-end - from technical design through delivery - including managing cross-team dependencies and coordinating migrations across many consuming teams. • Deep expertise in Linux systems, including boot and initialization, systems, processes, networking, filesystems, storage, packages, and production debugging. Strong foundations in cloud compute infrastructure, including machine images, virtual machines, autoscaling fleets, launch configuration, block storage, IAM, health evaluation, and multi-region operation in AWS, Azure, or an equivalent environment. • Experience designing or operating fleet-scale image, host-management, configuration-management, or infrastructure-provisioning systems. • Experience with safe infrastructure rollout practices, including automated validation, canarying, progressive rollout, health evaluation, rollback, and blast-radius containment. • Strong background in service reliability and operational excellence: demonstrated ability to lead incident response, reduce toil, and build systems that are reliable, debuggable, and maintainable by a team. • Track rec