Staff Engineer, RFA Forward Deployed Engineering

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

The RFA Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is a pivotal new unit dedicated to accelerating Stripe's strategic growth and market leadership in enterprise Revenue and Financial Automation (RFA). This is no ordinary engineering role; it's a unique leadership opportunity to be at the forefront of how Stripe builds and iterates on its products. We're directly tackling the most complex challenges faced by Stripe's largest and most strategic enterprise users, bridging the gap between their intricate financial operations and our core product capabilities.

Unlike traditional professional services, our mission is to identify and rapidly close critical Product-Market Fit (PMF) gaps in RFA. We often co-develop bespoke solutions and extensibility frameworks that will ultimately benefit a broader range of users across our entire product suite. You'll get to embed directly with key enterprise users, especially those in the high-growth AI segment, to deeply understand their unique challenges. Your work will involve rapid prototyping, building key product enhancements, and developing a scalable solutions framework that combines out-of-the-box functionality with robust customization capabilities. If you're passionate about solving complex, real-world problems for high-profile clients and actively shaping the future of financial automation at Stripe, this team offers an unparalleled opportunity to make a significant and lasting impact.

What you’ll do

As a Staff Engineer on the RFA Forward Deployed Engineering team, you will:

Responsibilities

• Lead with a product-first mindset: You'll be a leader in understanding our users' ambiguous, niche needs, and translating them into elegant, scalable technical solutions that address specific business problems.
• Drive product evolution through co-development: Design, build, and deploy critical enhancements and custom solutions to address product-market fit gaps, ensuring RFA meets the nuanced needs of large enterprises. You will also embed directly within RFA engineering teams to co-develop the highest leverage capabilities for our users, ensuring your solutions seamlessly integrate and enhance Stripe’s core offerings.
• Pioneer extensibility: Contribute to the development of a robust and intuitive customization framework for RFA, enabling tailored billing logic, financial workflows, and integrations. You'll be the primary contributor of solutions to the "RFA Suite of Solutions," building the toolkit that empowers enterprise customers to customize Stripe for their unique needs.
• Provide expert architectural guidance: Review user architectures, offer expert guidance on best practices, and optimize system integration and performance for complex enterprise environments. Your insights will be crucial to successful deployments and will help build a library of architectural guidance for the field team.
• Strategically resolve critical challenges: Act as the primary technical contact for high-impact user issues, leading the charge to diagnose and resolve complex product/engineering challenges across the stack. You'll not only fix problems but also identify systemic improvements, preventing future occurrences and influencing core product stability and long-term reliability.
• Directly influence product and engineering strategy: Provide direct, user-centric feedback to core product teams, advocating for features and capabilities essential for enterprise adoption and actively shaping the future of Stripe’s RFA offerings. You'll lead design reviews and provide strategic feedback to other engineers on the team, mentoring them and helping to build a world-class engineering culture.
• Help build and grow the team: Play a key role in building the team and developing the FDE model, helping to define our processes, best practices, and hiring strategy as we scale. You will be a foundational member of the team, helping us grow from a small, focused unit to a scalable, company-wide function.
• Elevate engineering standards: Elevate engineering standards, tooling, and processes within the team, contributing to a high-quality, maintainable codebase and efficient development lifecycle. You'll help us build for scale and sustainability.

Who you are

We’re looking for a seasoned and experienced engineer who thrives in a dynamic, user-focused environment and is excited by the challenge of building bespoke solutions that pave the way for broader product capabilities. This is a chance to wear many hats and have a direct, tangible impact on Stripe's most strategic initiatives, stepping into a key leadership position within a foundational new team.

Minimum requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on backend systems.
• Proven expertise in designing, building, and maintaining 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.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing, with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including external users. You'll be a bridge builder.
• A track record of thriving in collaborative environments, working closely 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.
• Ability to travel 20% of the time

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with RFA products such as Stripe Billing, Tax, and Revenue Recognition.
• Experience with extensibility models, custom solution frameworks, or platform development.
• Experience working with large enterprise users or in a user-facing engineering role.
• Prior experience in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where priorities can shift based on user needs, and you thrive on that challenge.