Staff Engineer, Release Engineering (Seattle)

Who We AreAbout StripeStripe 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 TeamThe Core Change Management group is responsible for the systems that let every Stripe engineer ship code, configuration, and infrastructure changes safely and at high velocity. You will be embedded primarily on the Service Deployments team — the owners of Stripe's end-to-end code deployment platform — with regular collaboration with the Resource Automation and Feature Deployments teams.Service Deployments owns the full lifecycle of software changes at Stripe. The team's mission is to let developers roll out code and configuration changes safely without sacrificing productivity, with a goal of meaningfully reducing change-related production incidents year over year. The team operates a meaningful on-call rotation and owns the systems that sit in the critical path of every engineer's daily workflow at Stripe.Resource Automation owns the safe-by-default infrastructure change layer: automated remote execution, incremental Infrastructure as Code tooling, cloud resource inventory, and cloud account governance and IAM role management. You will collaborate with this team on projects that span the boundary between deployment orchestration and cloud resource management.Feature Deployments owns Stripe's feature flag system, merchant entitlements, configuration management and distribution, and the audit log of change-correlated events. You will work with this team when deployment pipelines intersect with feature rollout and change safety tooling.What Makes This Role CompellingYou own the foundation of how Stripe ships software. The deployment platform sits in the critical path of every engineer's workflow at Stripe. The decisions you make affect thousands of deploys per day across hundreds of services, directly determining how fast and safely Stripe's product evolves.Technically rich, architecturally active. The team is executing several concurrent platform transformations: containerizing host-based services at scale, adding intelligent multi-service deploy pipelines, extending real-time anomaly detection to earlier stages of traffic shifts, and rebuilding deployment event infrastructure on top of a durable message bus. This is not maintenance work — the architecture is in motion.Broad surface area, real ownership. You will span the full stack from container scheduling and deployment orchestration business logic to the developer-facing internal platform UI. The problems are multi-layered: reliability, developer experience, performance, and safety all at once.Your judgment prevents incidents. The team's explicit goal is to drive down change-related incidents across Stripe by building better detection, smarter pipelines, and safer defaults. Your technical decisions have a direct and measurable safety impact on Stripe's reliability.Agency to shape technical strategy. As a Staff engineer on Service Deployments, you will set technical direction for the team's systems, author designs that span multiple teams, and be the person engineering managers and engineers turn to for the hardest deployment infrastructure questions.ResponsibilitiesOwn end-to-end technical delivery of large, ambiguous infrastructure projects — from initial design through production launch and long-term reliability. Author the design, sequence the work, unblock the team, and shepherd projects to landed impact.Architect the next generation of Stripe's deployment platform. Lead technical design of the deployment orchestrator's evolution — including multi-service dependency-aware autodeploy pipelines, Kubernetes-native deployment primitives, and fleetwide container migration — defining the API contracts, rollout strategies, and operational model that hundreds of teams depend on.Extend deploy anomaly detection. Evolve blue-green traffic analysis: extend coverage to earlier traffic-split stages, design API/method-based regression detection, and build a self-service onboarding system that makes anomaly detection the default for all supported service types.Lead the host-to-container fleet migration. Drive sequencing, backward compatibility, and cross-team coordination for migrating Stripe's fleet of host-based services to containerized, fleetwide deployments — keeping the production deployment system operational while executing the transformation.Own reliability and operational excellence for the deployment platform. Lead incident response; systematically reduce operational toil; and make reliability, security, and maintainability first-class properties of the systems you own.Build deployment event infrastructure. Own the deployment notification and event-publishing architecture — designing the event schema, durability model, and integration contracts that downstream systems rely on for observability and automation.Collaborate across Core Change Management. Partner with Resource Automation on projects that span deployment orchestration and cloud resource management (IAM, account provisioning, infrastructure automation), with Feature Deployments on change-safety tooling (feature flags, configuration management, change audit logs) that integrates with or depends on the deployment pipeline, and with the service mesh team on routing capabilities that enable advanced deployment patterns such as canary rollouts and merchant-priority traffic shaping.Set the technical bar. Own critical design reviews, establish standards for deployment safety and developer experience, mentor senior engineers through high-stakes architectural decisions, and advocate for the right abstractions — code that consuming teams can adopt without becoming deployment infrastructure experts.Decompose complexity for the team. Translate large, open-ended platform challenges into scoped, parallelizable work; help engineers grow by framing problems clearly and providing decisive technical guidance on the hardest questions.Who You AreMinimum Requirements10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of designing and shipping production infrastructure systems of significant scale and complexity.Proven ability to lead large, ambiguous infrastructure projects end-to-end — from technical design through delivery — including managing cross-team dependencies and coordinating migrations across many consuming teams.Deep expertise in distributed systems and deployment orchestration: strong foundations in how services are built, scheduled, and operated at scale, including rollout strategies, staged delivery, and failure modes.Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container-based deployments, including service lifecycle management, workload scheduling, and the operational challenges of migrating large fleets from VM-based to containerized infrastructure.Strong background in service reliability and operational excellence: demonstrated ability to lead incident response, reduce toil, and build systems that are reliable, debuggable, and maintainable by a team.Track record of broad technical impact across multiple large systems: fluency across a complex codebase, force-multiplier effect through code review and mentorship, and the ability to set technical direction for a team rather than just execute within it.Preferred RequirementsBackground in deployment safety systems: anomaly detection, automated rollback, progressive delivery, or similar mechanisms that reduce the blast radius of bad deployments.Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka or equivalent) applied to deployment lifecycle observability and notification.Experience with Infrastructure as Code at scale — Terraform or equivalent — particularly in the context of cloud resource governance and IAM management in AWS or Azure.Developer platform or internal tooling background: a strong developer experience sensibility and the ability to build abstractions that reduce toil for the engineering teams that depend on your platform.Change management and feature rollout systems: experience with feature flags, configuration distribution, or audit-log infrastructure that provides safety guardrails around production changes.Familiarity with service mesh concepts (canary deployments, weighted routing, traffic-splitting) sufficient to collaborate effectively with partner teams on routing capabilities that enable advanced deployment patterns.In-Office ExpectationsOffice-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.