Backend Engineer (Forward Deployed Engineering)

Requirements

• You're a strong engineer who also thinks like a product person,
• You're comfortable with ambiguity, you'd rather talk to a user than read a spec, and you care about whether the thing you built actually solved the problem,
• Think: early engineer at a startup who played PM, did product discovery, partnered with users, and shipped,
• You're also interested in working at the frontier of agent-augmented engineering, not just using AI tools but helping define how an engineering function operates alongside them,
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on backend systems,
• Proven ability to design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable, and secure systems,
• Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and data modeling,
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to quickly grasp complex technical and business domains,
• Clear communicator, both written and verbal, with technical and non-technical stakeholders including external users,
• Track record of working well in collaborative environments with product managers, TPMs, and other engineers,
• Willingness to engage directly with users to understand requirements and co-develop solutions. This is a core part of the role,
• Willingness to travel (~20-30%) to Stripe sites (Toronto, SF, Seattle) and user locations,
• (Desirable) Experience with financial automation or billing products (e.g., Stripe Billing, Tax, Revenue Recognition, or similar),
• (Desirable) Experience with multi-product integration: stitching together payments, invoicing, billing, and related systems,
• (Desirable) Familiarity with extensibility models, custom solution frameworks, or platform development,
• (Desirable) Experience working with large enterprise users or in a customer-facing engineering role,
• (Desirable) Prior experience in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where priorities shift based on user needs,
• (Desirable) Interest in or experience with AI-augmented engineering: working with AI agents, LLM-powered tooling, or building workflows where humans and AI collaborate

What the job involves

• The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team exists to solve the hardest problems our most complex enterprise users face, and to turn those solutions into platform capabilities that scale to everyone,
• We work across Revenue Suite, Payments, and adjacent products. This is not a support function,
• It is an engineering team that sits at the boundary between Stripe's platform and the real-world complexity of how large enterprises actually use it,
• The traditional FDE playbook, one engineer per user who manually rebuilds context every rotation, is how every infrastructure company has done it for a decade. It does not scale,
• We are building something different: an agent-augmented model where AI handles the context-heavy, structured work (integration mapping, state reconciliation, infrastructure shadow testing, diagnostics) and human FDEs focus on the parts that require engineering judgment, product thinking, and direct user relationships,
• The goal is to build engineering muscle that lets us serve every strategic user through the platform, not just the handful we can staff individually,
• We've proven the approach with some of the world's most demanding enterprise users, delivering measurable auth rate improvements, unblocking critical platform migrations, closing multi-product integration gaps, and driving real revenue,
• Now we're scaling the model. If you want to solve hard user problems, build reusable platform solutions, and help shape how forward deployed engineering works as a discipline, this is the team,
• Work alongside AI agents to serve users at scale: This is central to how our team operates,
• AI agents maintain real-time integration maps, run shadow tests against user setups, and perform automated state reconciliation between Stripe and user systems,
• Your job is the work that requires an engineer: making judgment calls on ambiguous problems, building relationships with user engineering teams, making product decisions, and designing solutions,
• You will also help shape the tooling itself, identifying what should be automated and what needs to stay human,
• Engage directly with users: You will work with Stripe's most strategic enterprise users to understand their revenue, billing, and payments requirements,
• You translate what you learn into technical solutions, and you bring that user reality back to product teams,
• This is a genuinely user-facing role, not user-facing in the "I read a dashboard" sense,
• Build across product boundaries,
• You will design and deploy products and solutions that address product-market fit gaps, not just in Billing but across multi-product boundaries (Payments + Invoicing + Global LPMs),
• You embed within Stripe product engineering teams to co-develop the highest-leverage capabilities,
• Build reusable solutions, not one-off fixes: Contribute to a customization framework for RFA and adjacent products: tailored billing logic, financial workflows, integrations (custom metering, product catalog integrations, checkout flows),
• Build patterns and blueprints that scale beyond the individual engagement,
• Provide architectural guidance: Review user architectures, advise on best practices, and optimize integration and performance for complex enterprise environments,
• Contribute to a growing library of architectural patterns for the field,
• Resolve critical technical challenges: Diagnose and fix complex product/engineering problems across the stack,
• Identify systemic improvements that prevent recurrence and improve platform stability,
• Inform the product roadmap: The integration gaps, migration friction, and multi-product failures you surface directly shape Stripe's product strategy,
• You advocate for what users actually need based on what you've seen firsthand,
• Raise the bar on engineering: Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes within the team,
• Help build for sustainability as the team grows