Staff Engineer, Identity

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

Before Stripe, every growing internet platform had a payments team. Today, every growing internet platform has an Identity team. Identity verification has become core economic infrastructure for online businesses — enabling them to digitally verify their users' identities for fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and trust and safety purposes.

At Stripe, we're building something more ambitious than a verification product. Our vision is to build the world's most trusted store of verified identities — a single, global, reusable, risk-scored representation of every individual who interacts with Stripe and beyond. This Identity Store becomes a platform with compounding network effects: more verifications enrich the store; a richer store produces better fraud signals; better signals mean lower friction for trusted users; lower friction drives more adoption.

Our product today serves millions of verifications per month for customers like OpenAI, Shopify, and WhatNot, and powers identity verification across multiple internal Stripe products including Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto. The problems ahead — adversarial AI and deepfake defense, networked identity infrastructure, progressive verification platforms, and low friction KYC APIs — sit at the frontier of what's possible in identity engineering.

What you’ll do

As a Full Stack 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.

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

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 software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience in a strategic technical leadership role.

Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API desig