Machine Learning Engineer, Capital Underwriting

Machine Learning Engineer, Capital Underwriting

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.

Machine learning is an integral part of almost every service at Stripe. Key products and use-cases powered by ML at Stripe include merchant and transaction risk, payments optimization and personalization, identity verification, and merchant data analytics and insights. We are also using the latest generative AI technologies to re-imagine product experiences, and are developing AI Assistants both for our customers and to make Stripes more productive across Support, Marketing, Sales, and Engineering roles within the company.

Stripe handles over $1T in payments volume per year, which is roughly 1% of the world's GDP. We process petabytes of financial data using our ML platform to build features, train models, and deploy them to production. We use a combination of highly scalable and explainable models such as linear/logistic regression and random forests, along with the latest deep neural networks from transformers to LLMs. Some of our latest innovations have been around figuring out how best to bring transformers and LLMs to improve existing models and enable entirely new product ideas that are only made possible by GenAI. Stripe's ML models serve millions of users daily and reduce financial risk, increase payment success rate, and grow the GDP of the internet. We work on challenging problems with large business impact, and seek to foster creativity and innovation.

Stripe Capital provides access to fast, flexible financing to small-and-medium businesses on Stripe to accelerate their growth, and we lent over $1B in 2024. Businesses use the funds for marketing, team growth, geographic expansion, working capital, new equipment purchases, and much more.

Machine learning is core to Stripe Capital's business—we use information about businesses from their activity within and outside of Stripe and our models to automatically underwrite uniquely tailored financing offers to their needs, which banks are often unable to do. We are doing so through models with an established performance history, data infrastructure that is Stripe scale, and a strong feedback loop that includes explainability, anomaly detection and a risk portfolio management layer. We're an end-to-end team going from ideas to models to shipping in production.

As a machine learning engineer for Stripe Capital, you will be responsible for designing, building, training, evaluating, deploying, and owning ML models in production with the goals of providing financing opportunities to as many users as possible while satisfying financial performance goals. You will work closely with software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and risk managers to operate Stripe's ML powered systems, features, and products. You will also contribute to and influence ML architecture at Stripe and be a part of a larger ML community.

Design state-of-the-art ML models and large scale ML systems for underwriting and portfolio management for Stripe Capital based on ML principles, domain knowledge, risk, regulatory and engineering constraints

Design systems to speed up the time from idea to deployment of new models

Experiment and iterate on ML models (using tools such as PyTorch and TensorFlow) to achieve key business goals and drive efficiency

Develop pipelines and automated processes to train and evaluate models in offline and online environments

Integrate ML models into production systems and ensure their scalability and reliability

Collaborate with product and strategy partners to propose, prioritize, and implement new product features

Engage with the latest developments in ML/AI and take calculated risks in transforming innovative ML ideas into productionized solutions

We are looking for ML Engineers who are passionate about building ML systems that touch the lives of millions. You have experience developing efficient feature pipelines, building advanced ML models, and deploying them to production. You are comfortable with ambiguity, love to take initiative, have a bias towards action, and thrive in a collaborative environment.

We're looking for someone who can bring new ideas to the table on building models able to push the state of the art at Stripe, especially within the regulatory and operational constraints of a financing business.

Minimum requirements:

• 5+ years of industry experience building and shipping ML systems in production
• Proficient with ML libraries and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost, as well as Spark
• Knowledge of various ML algorithms and model architectures
• Hands-on experience in designing, training, and evaluating machine learning models
• Hands-on experience in productionizing and deploying models at scale
• Hands-on experience in orchestrating complicated data pipelines and efficiently leveraging large-scale datasets
• Hands-on experience in collaborating across multiple teams, especially Data Science and Risk Management teams

Preferred qualifications:

• MS/PhD degree in ML/AI or related field (e.g. math, physics, statistics)
• Proven track record of building and deploying ML systems that have effectively solved ambiguous business problems
• Experience in adversarial domains such as Lending, Trading, Fraud
• Experience with Deep Learning including the latest architectures such as transformers, test-time compute, reinforcement learning

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.

The annual US base salary range for this role is $180,000 - $270,000. 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 location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the US may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Additional benefits for this role may include: equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; medical, dental, and vision benefits; and wellness stipends.

Office locations: South San Francisco HQ, or New York

Team: Banking as a Service

Job type: Full time