Staff Software Engineer, Stream Compute

What you'll do You'll help define and deliver the next generation of Stripe's Flink-first stream compute infrastructure—driving innovation to meet extremely high availability targets at global scale. Partnering with infrastructure engineers, adjacent platform teams, and the product orgs that depend on Flink every day, you'll set a long-term technical direction that scales with Stripe's growth while enabling reliable, efficient operations for years to come. You'll work on the hardest problems in operating Flink in production—state management, exactly-once processing, performance isolation, and automated recovery—so teams across Stripe can confidently build stateful stream processing applications on top of it. Responsibilities Design, build, and operate stream compute infrastructure with Apache Flink at the center, alongside technologies like Kafka, Temporal, and AWS services Partner with product and platform teams across Stripe to understand requirements, unblock Flink adoption, and improve how stream processing infrastructure is used end-to-end Define and implement operational best practices (e.g., shuffle sharding, cellular architecture, load shedding, automated state recovery) to improve resilience and reliability at scale Drive fleet-level automation and standardization ("pets" to "cattle") through self-service workflows, safer rollouts, and self-healing systems that reduce manual operations Lead initiatives that raise the bar on Flink availability and state durability (e.g., multi-region strategies, disaster recovery readiness, operational readiness reviews, incident learning) Evaluate and productionize Flink ecosystem capabilities (e.g., SQL, connectors, state backends) to improve developer experience and scalability without compromising reliability Work closely with the open-source community to identify opportunities for adopting new open-source features and contributing back to OSS 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 This is a Staff-level role—that typically means 10+ years of experience building, operating, and evolving large-scale production systems. Experience as a technical lead for team(s) working on distributed systems, including scaling them in fast-moving environments Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Flink, Spark, Kafka, Pulsar, or Pinot Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems built with open-source tools Experience building and scaling infrastructure as a product • Strong software engineering skills and a passion for big data distributed systems Ability to write high-quality code (in programming languages like Go, Java, Scala, etc.) Comfortable operating with high autonomy and ownership Growth mindset and a willingness to learn quickly, explore ambiguous problem spaces, and dive deep when needed Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation Preferred qualifications Experience operating streaming infrastructure as a platform (e.g., Flink clusters, Kafka, Pulsar) for internal customers at scale Deep hands-on experience authoring, optimizing, and operating real-time processing frameworks such as Flink, Spark Streaming, Storm, or Kafka Streams in production Experience building or operating control planes for managing large-scale infrastructure Open-source contributions to data processing or big data systems (Hadoop, Spark, Celeborn, Flink, etc.)