Staff Backend Engineer, Supportability Decisions

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 Supportability sits at the vital intersection of platform safety, regulatory trust and merchant growth. Our mission is to ensure legitimate businesses can seamlessly onboard and thrive on Stripe, while proactively safeguarding the financial ecosystem from bad actors and high-risk activity. The Supportability Decisions team is a newly forming pillar anchored in our Dublin office. In this role, you will be the foundational technical lead establishing this capability in Dublin. Our mission is to accelerate Stripe’s global expansion by building the canonical Supportability Decision Layer; a stateful distributed platform that provides unified, real-time, and explainable risk determinations to unlock fast, compliant merchant onboarding and payment method expansion worldwide. Doing this at scale requires solving high-stakes risk challenges with precision. Deceptive merchant activity, such as transaction laundering, introduces significant threats as bad actors actively adapt to mask illicit and unsupported activities behind legitimate storefronts. Rather than relying on rigid, fragmented controls that create unnecessary friction for good users, our team builds the intelligent decision systems that systematically separate legitimate businesses from adversarial behavior, enabling Stripe to grow safely and aggressively. What you’ll do As a Staff Backend Engineer and Technical Lead for Supportability Decisions, you will take ownership of defining and building this new space from the ground up. You will tackle high-ambiguity technical challenges in an adversarial threat landscape, turning broad risk policies and operational needs into resilient, high-throughput backend services and stateful decision engines. As the technical anchor in Dublin, you will set architectural patterns, mentor engineers as the team scales from its initial members to ~7 ICs, and drive technical alignment with distributed partner teams globally. Responsibilities - Lead the technical vision, system architecture and delivery of the canonical Supportability Decision Layer, establishing stateful, explainable decision APIs consumed across automated systems and human operations. - Architect decision aggregation and orchestration pipelines, synthesizing upstream evaluations (such as web-presence intelligence, backsite detection, and agentic assessments) into unified, low-latency determinations. - Design high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend services that balance platform safety, regulatory compliance, and minimal friction for legitimate merchants. - Navigate ambiguous, zero-to-one problem spaces to define clean domain models, contracts and interfaces across transaction laundering detection, web-presence screening and Local Payment Method (LPM) support. - Build resilient decision engines designed to withstand circumvention, ensuring systems maintain integrity against sophisticated bad actors who actively evolve their tactics. - Serve as the technical lead and mentor for the Dublin engineering team, setting architectural patterns, conducting design reviews, and raising the technical bar as the team expands. - Partner closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Risk Operations, and Data Science to translate strategic risk policy into scalable technical roadmaps. - Drive technical alignment and system integrations across global partner teams, leveraging strong written design artifacts and asynchronous collaboration to ensure cohesive platform architecture. Who you are We're looking for a technical leader who thrives in ambiguity, has deep distributed systems instincts, and is energized by building a critical platform that enables global merchant growth while safeguarding the financial ecosystem. If that sounds like you, we encourage you to apply. Minimum Requirements - 10+ years of professional backend software engineering experience building and maintaining complex distributed systems in production. - Proven track record as a technical lead or staff engineer driving multi-quarter technical initiatives from ambiguous requirements to production delivery. - Deep experience designing durable, scalable APIs, data models, and backend architectures capable of processing mission-critical data with high reliability. - Strong communication and leadership skills with experience mentoring engineers, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, and driving technical consensus across distributed teams. - Fluency in a modern backend language (such as Ruby, Java, Go, Python, or C++). Preferred Qualifications - Experience building systems in trust, safety, or risk domains where external bad actors actively evolve their tactics (e.g., transaction laundering, fraud, deceptive practices, or platform abuse). - Experience architecting workflow orchestration, policy evaluation, or decision platforms that balance robust risk evaluation with frictionless merchant onboarding and product access. - Familiarity with global payment ecosystems, Local Payment Methods (LPMs), financial partner dynamics, or card network standards. - Background in agentic workflows, orchestrators, or integrating machine learning models into real-time decision backend pipelines. - Prior experience serving as an anchor or founding engineer establishing a new team or technical domain in a regional engineering hub. In-office expectations Office-assigned Stripes in most of our locations are currently expected to spend at least 50% of the time in a given month in their local office or with users. This expectation may vary depending on role, team and location. For example, Stripes in Stripe Delivery Center roles in Mexico City, Mexico, Bengaluru, India, and Dublin, Ireland work 100% from the office. Also, some teams have greater in-office attendance requirements, to appropriately support our users and workflows, which the hiring manager will discuss. This approach helps strike a balance between bringing people together for in-person collaboration and learning from each other, while supporting flexibility when possible. Pay and benefits The annual salary range for this role in the primary location is €132,000 - €198,000. This range may change if you are hired in another location. For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings (“OTE”) range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role. This salary range may be inclusive of several career levels at Stripe and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and specific location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the primary location may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process. Specific benefits and details about what compensation is included in the salary range listed above will vary depending on the applicant’s location and can be discussed in more detail during the interview process. Benefits/additional compensation for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; retirement plans; health benefits; and wellness stipends. We look forward to hearing from you. At Stripe, we're looking for people with passion, grit, and integrity. You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out—and set you apart—especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. At Stripe, we welcome diverse perspectives and people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions. Join us. Apply now Please find our EU applicant personal information notice here.