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 Before Stripe, every growing internet platform had a payments team. Today, every growing internet platform has an Identity team. Identity verification has become core economic infrastructure for online businesses — enabling them to digitally verify their users' identities for fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and trust and safety purposes. At Stripe, we're building something more ambitious than a verification product. Our vision is to build the world's most trusted store of verified identities — a single, global, reusable, risk-scored representation of every individual who interacts with Stripe and beyond. This Identity Store becomes a platform with compounding network effects: more verifications enrich the store; a richer store produces better fraud signals; better signals mean lower friction for trusted users; lower friction drives more adoption. Our product today serves millions of verifications per month for customers like OpenAI, Shopify, and WhatNot, and powers identity verification across multiple internal Stripe products including Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto. The problems ahead — adversarial AI and deepfake defense, networked identity infrastructure, progressive verification platforms, and low friction KYC APIs — sit at the frontier of what's possible in identity engineering. This role is open to candidates based in our Seattle, New York, or San Francisco offices, or remote within the US. For Stripes who live within 35 miles of an office, we offer a hybrid work environment with an expectation of in-office presence 50% of your working days each month. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Full Stack Staff Engineer on the Identity team, you will own the technical direction of one of Stripe's most strategically important product areas. This is not a role defined by task execution — it's a role defined by technical judgment, architectural influence, and the ability to turn an ambitious vision into a reliable, scalable system. RESPONSIBILITIES * Own technical strategy — Define the architecture for Identity's core systems (Identity Store, headless verification platform, fraud detection infrastructure), make build vs. buy vs. partner decisions, and surface technical risks before they become customer-facing failures * Lead 0-1 platform development — Architect net-new systems including the Identity Store, Networked Identity platform, and advanced fraud detection pipeline (behavioral biometrics, deepfake discriminators, adversarial training). Drive the evolution from a hosted-UI product to a headless-API and embedded-components platform * Drive cross-functional alignment — Be the primary technical voice in roadmap and resourcing discussions. Partner with ML, product, legal, and engineering leads across Risk, Fraud, Link, Connect, and Crypto to ensure Identity's abstractions serve the full breadth of Stripe's product surface * Raise the technical bar — Set engineering standards across ML, backend, mobile, and front-end; lead design reviews; and mentor senior engineers on the judgment needed to operate a high-stakes, externally-facing product * Operate with ownership — Be accountable for reliability, scalability, and security of the systems you design — including the observability and alerting that catch model drift and fraud pattern shifts before customers do 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 * 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience in a strategic technical leadership role * Experience leading engineering team(s) working on API design, abstractions, frameworks, or client libraries (e.g. building internal or external developer products) * Proven track record of delivering pragmatic solutions that accelerate business growth * Ability to adjust conversations from high-level discussions to detailed coding * Clear and persuasive writing and in-person communication PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience with identity verification, fraud detection, or trust and safety systems — especially systems with adversarial inputs at scale * Familiarity with ML systems in production: model serving, training pipelines, observability, drift detection, and the feedback loops that keep models accurate under adversarial conditions * Experience building platform products with multiple consumer types — internal platform teams and external developers — where API backward compatibility and abstraction quality are first-class concerns * Prior experience with 0-1 product builds: you've started with a blank page and ended with a production system, and you have clear opinions about what makes that process go well or poorly * Experience across a range of software languages and frameworks; our stack includes primarily Ruby and TypeScript on the backend, Python for ML and data pipelines, with infrastructure spanning Kafka, Temporal, Protobuf, React, SQL (Spark and Trino dialects), Airflow, Bazel, Mongo, Splunk, and Prometheus * Experience navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving organization — you can make confident technical decisions with incomplete information and update gracefully when new constraints emerge