Senior Staff Engineer, Merchant Experience

🏢 About Stripe

Stripe is a leading financial infrastructure platform empowering millions of businesses, from ambitious startups to global enterprises, to manage payments, boost revenue, and seize new opportunities. Their core mission is to significantly increase the GDP of the internet by providing essential tools and services that make the global economy accessible to everyone. The Merchant Experience team is crucial to this mission, building the foundational UI operating system and core experiences that drive growth for businesses worldwide. They own the Stripe Dashboard and the frameworks and tooling used by hundreds of Stripe engineers to create world-class user interfaces. The team is at an exciting juncture, exploring how AI can fundamentally transform merchant interactions and is committed to raising the bar on quality and performance for their fast, reliable, and carefully crafted experiences.

🎯 The Role

As a Senior Staff Engineer on the Merchant Experience team, you will serve as a key technical leader, instrumental in defining the next generation of how Stripe merchants interact with products. This role involves driving substantial improvements in the quality and performance of core user interfaces and pioneering the integration of AI into merchant experiences at Stripe. You will be responsible for overseeing a portfolio of products and guiding multiple engineering teams.

🛠️ Tech Stack

The role requires deep expertise in modern frontend and full-stack development, with a strong emphasis on user experience. Key technologies and concepts include:

• React (ideally for building design systems, component libraries, or frontend platform infrastructure)
• Design Systems & Component Libraries
• Frontend Platform Infrastructure
• Performance Engineering (profiling, instrumentation, budgeting, optimization)
• Web Application Deployment at Global Scale (bundling, CDNs, browser compatibility, build tooling)
• AI Integration into User-Facing Products
• Distributed Systems & API Design (comfort working across the full stack)

💼 What You'll Do

• Define and execute the technical strategy for merchant-facing experiences across Stripe, prioritizing quality, performance, and AI integration into user workflows.
• Lead the design and delivery of complex, cross-team engineering projects to enhance the reliability, responsiveness, and polish of Stripe's merchant surfaces.
• Champion a quality-first engineering culture by establishing standards, tooling, and processes that facilitate the delivery of high-quality, performant UI.
• Drive performance as a critical product feature, owning the technical approach to optimize the speed and responsiveness of the Dashboard and merchant tools.
• Innovate and prototype future merchant UX paradigms, exploring how AI can transform product discovery, configuration, and operation.
• Develop platforms and abstractions, including frameworks, components, and developer tools, to boost the productivity of Stripe engineers.
• Collaborate extensively with Product, Design, AI/ML, and infrastructure teams to translate high-level product visions into actionable technical roadmaps.
• Mentor and develop engineers across the organization, elevating technical standards and fostering a culture of craftsmanship.

✅ What You'll Need

• A minimum of 10-15 years of industry experience, with a scope that includes overseeing 4-6 teams and managing an entire product portfolio.
• Proven experience in building and deploying complex, user-facing web applications for large audiences (hundreds of thousands of users) or with contributions from hundreds of engineers.
• A strong track record of leading large-scale, cross-functional engineering projects with significant organizational impact.
• Deep expertise in modern frontend and full-stack development, coupled with strong opinions on user experience and the technical prowess to realize them.
• Demonstrated ability to achieve measurable improvements in software quality and performance (e.g., load times, reliability, test coverage, error rates).
• Experience in influencing technical direction and fostering alignment across multiple teams without direct formal authority.
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of articulating a compelling technical vision to engineers, product leaders, and executives.

🌟 Nice to Have

• Experience in building or maintaining design systems, component libraries, or frontend platform infrastructure at scale, ideally utilizing React.
• A profound interest in the intersection of AI and UX, with a critical perspective on how emerging technologies reshape interaction models.
• Expertise in performance engineering, including profiling, instrumentation, budgeting, and optimizing modern web applications.
• Familiarity with the complexities of deploying large web applications globally, encompassing bundling, CDNs, browser compatibility, and build tooling.
• Comfort working across the full stack, including APIs, backend services, or data layers, even though the role primarily skews towards frontend.
• Experience with distributed systems, API design, and developing platforms for both internal developers and external users.
• A strong passion for enhancing developer experience and improving engineering productivity.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and actively contributing to engineering culture and hiring initiatives.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI-powered capabilities into user-facing products to simplify complex workflows.