# Senior Staff Engineer, Big Data Infrastructure

- **Company:** [Stripe](https://aijobsgrid.com/companies/stripe)
- **Location:** San Francsico
- **Remote:** No
- **Salary:** Not disclosed
- **Seniority:** Staff
- **Category:** data engineer
- **Posted:** 2026-11-05
- **Status:** Open

**Apply:** https://aijobsgrid.com/api/jobs/ajg-bc2aed/apply (opens the employer's own application page)

## Job description

#### **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**

In this role, you’d be joining the Big Data Infrastructure team. Our team builds and maintains the platforms that power data work across Stripe, managing three core layers:

- Data Orchestration (Airflow)
- Batch Compute (Spark, Celeborn)

- Data Lake (Iceberg, Hive, S3, Azure Blob Storage)

We support over 2,000 engineers and 600+ internal teams, processing workloads that organically grow more than 30% year over year. Our infrastructure handles massive scale, managing over 800 PB of data, running 325,000 applications a day, and accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual spend, directly powering critical pipelines like inbound payments, network reconciliation, and capital underwriting.

#### **What you’ll do**

As the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, you will guide a 40+ person engineering team to scale our foundational data systems. You will partner closely with major internal customers like Data Foundations, Payins Engineering, and AI/ML Foundations to modernize our tech stack and execute Stripe's transition to the "Agentic Era" - building "invisible infrastructure" where AI agents operate data pipelines end-to-end.

##### **Responsibilities**

- Serve as the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, overseeing distributed systems that manage 20% of Stripe's total AWS spend
- Execute Stripe's transition to the "Agentic Era" by building invisible infrastructure that empowers AI agents to author, validate, ship, and operate data pipelines

- Drive the architecture and delivery of critical modernization bets, including YARN to Kubernetes migrations, native vectorization (Gluten/Velox), and Airflow and Data Catalog modernization
- Lead the implementation of a multi-region and multi-cloud data strategy for high availability, disaster recovery, and Azure Blob Storage compliance

- Reduce operational burden and maintenance overhead (KTLO) from over 40% to under 10% by shifting fixes into the platform instead of relying on runbooks
- Foster a culture of operational excellence and mentor engineers at various stages in their careers, up to Staff+

#### **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**

- BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field
- This is a Senior Staff role, so ideally 12+ years of professional experience in a software development role

- A strong engineering background in distributed infrastructure and/or platform services, including one or more of the following: storage, databases, or compute
- Experience leading projects on a cross-team and company-wide scale, including scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime

- Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems while optimizing their reliability and security
- Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards

##### **Preferred qualifications**

- Experience driving AI-led architectural transformations and integrating agentic workflows into large-scale data systems
- Experience in a development team at AWS, Azure, OCI, or Google

- Experience with big data infrastructure at scale, such as Spark, Iceberg, S3, Airflow, YARN, and Celeborn
- Experience with database internals and/or with Kubernetes

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