Staff Engineer, Data Lake

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

Stripe’s Data Lake team owns the storage layer, metadata services, and supporting tooling that power analytics, machine learning, and data-driven products across the company. We build and operate the petabyte-scale data lake that sits atop cloud object storage, enabling thousands of engineers, scientists, and risk analysts to discover, secure, and query data efficiently. Our platform is built on open-source technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Parquet, Trino, Spark, and Flink, and it is a critical foundation for Stripe’s decision-making, reporting, and risk systems.

What you’ll do

We’re looking for a Staff Engineer with deep experience designing, building, and scaling distributed data systems. You will help lead the next evolution of Stripe’s data lake—moving toward a secure, compliant, and cost-efficient storage layer that seamlessly supports both streaming and batch workloads. You’ll work closely with partner teams and open-source communities to create state-of-the-art infrastructure that makes data at Stripe fast, reliable, and secure.

Responsibilities

• Scope, design, and lead high-impact technical projects within the Data Lake domain
• Build and maintain the core services and tooling that power Stripe’s data lake: metadata/catalog services, table formats, ingestion pipelines, and governance controls
• Optimize end-to-end performance and cost across storage and compute engines 
• Drive the adoption of emerging open-source capabilities and contribute fixes and features back to projects such as Apache Iceberg, Parquet.
• Champion operational excellence—ensuring the data lake is highly available, reliable, secure, and compliant
• Partner with product and data teams to understand user needs and shape the roadmap for a “data lake as a product” experience

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 writing high quality production level code or software programs.
• Have experience with distributed data systems such as Spark, Flink, Trino, Kafka ,etc
• Experience developing, maintaining and debugging distributed systems built with open source tools.
• Experience building infrastructure as a product centered around user needs.

Preferred qualifications

• Hands-on experience with modern open-source data lake technologies such as Apache Iceberg
• Experience operating large-scale data lakes on AWS S3, GCS, or equivalent cloud object storage
• Contributions to relevant open-source projects (Iceberg, Trino, Parquet, Spark, Flink, etc.)
• Familiarity with data governance, security, and compliance requirements in regulated environments

 

Hybrid work at Stripe

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.

Pay and benefits

The annual salary range for this role in the primary location is €126,400 - €189,600. This range may change if you are hired in another location. 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 specific location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the primary location may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Specific benefits and details about what compensation is included in the salary range listed above will vary depending on the applicant’s location and can be discussed in more detail during the interview process. Benefits/additional compensation for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; retirement plans; health benefits; and wellness stipends.

We look forward to hearing from you

At Stripe, we're looking for people with passion, grit, and integrity. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. At Stripe, we welcome diverse perspectives and people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions. Join us.