Staff Software Engineer, Datalake Platform

About Stripe

Stripe is a comprehensive financial infrastructure platform empowering millions of businesses worldwide, from large enterprises to startups, enabling payment acceptance, revenue growth, and innovative business expansion. The company’s mission is to boost the internet's economic output, providing a unique opportunity to impact the global economy while undertaking meaningful career work.

About the Team

The Datalake team is responsible for creating and maintaining Stripe's critical data access and governance infrastructure, ensuring secure, quick, and compliant access to vast data assets. This platform serves various users, including developers, data engineers, analysts, ML/AI personnel, security, and business teams. The team is currently engaged in a major architectural transition aimed at enhancing the data lake’s role as a pivotal part of the modern data ecosystem to handle growing scale and diverse workloads.

Role Highlights

• Work on foundational infrastructure impacting nearly every data task at Stripe, influencing petabytes of data and numerous engineering teams.
• Lead a multi-year migration to contemporary, open-source aligned data solutions, including Apache Iceberg, addressing deep architectural challenges such as API design and authorization models.
• Take ownership of the object storage abstraction layer, including access control and compliance architecture, shaping how hundreds of teams interact with massive data volumes.
• Enjoy the resources of a large firm combined with the autonomy to mold technical strategy and roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect a unified Iceberg metastore platform serving as the authoritative source for table management across compute engines (Spark, Trino, Flink, PyIceberg), defining APIs, authorization, credential vending, and integration standards.
• Plan and execute the metastore migration strategy, ensuring backward compatibility, rollback procedures, and coordinating with multiple teams to transition from Hive Metastore systems without disrupting production.
• Design the object storage abstraction layer with components like bucket provisioning, access policies, and client libraries that promote usability and security for developers.
• Collaborate with security and compliance to embed regulatory requirements into the platform through technical controls such as audit logging, access reviews, data segregation, and lifecycle management.
• Enhance cost efficiency and operational scalability by addressing storage layouts, snapshot retention, and data lifecycle issues with automated, self-service tools.
• Set high technical standards by owning design reviews, reliability, security, developer experience benchmarks, and mentoring senior engineers through critical architectural decisions.

Minimum Qualifications

• Over 10 years of experience in professional software engineering roles.
• Proven history designing, building, and maintaining large-scale distributed storage or data infrastructure systems.
• Extensive knowledge of object storage platforms such as S3 or Azure Blob, including IAM, access policy design, lifecycle management at petabyte scale.
• Successful leadership of extensive infrastructure projects, managing dependencies and migrations involving multiple teams.
• Strong expertise in authorization and access control mechanisms for distributed data systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep understanding of Apache Iceberg internals, REST Catalog specifications, lifecycle management, compaction, and integration with compute engines.
• Experience with compliance-oriented infrastructure (e.g., SOX, ICFR), translating audit and review requirements into proactive technical controls.
• Skilled in managing large-scale data migrations with emphasis on sequencing, minimizing impact, rollback strategies, and data integrity assurance.
• Focus on developer experience by creating intuitive, well-documented abstractions that reduce engineering toil.

Work Location and Attendance

Employees designated to this office in Dublin are expected to spend at least 50% of their working time on-site monthly, supporting collaboration and user engagement. Some roles, including those in Dublin, require 100% office presence. Specific requirements may vary depending on team needs.

Compensation and Benefits

The annual compensation for this position in Dublin ranges between €132,000 and €198,000, subject to adjustment based on location and candidate qualifications. The total compensation may include equity, bonuses, retirement plans, health insurance, and wellness allowances, with further details provided during the hiring process.