# Senior Staff Engineer, Big Data Infrastructure

**Company:** [Stripe](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-companies/stripe)
**Location:** San Francsico
**Work mode:** On-site
**Seniority:** Senior
**Category:** Software
**Department:** Other
**Listed:** 2026-11-05

[View and apply on Zero G Talent](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-jobs/stripe/senior-staff-engineer-big-data-infrastructure-8317306)

## What you'll do

- Guide a 40+ person engineering team to scale data systems
- Lead YARN to Kubernetes migrations and data catalog modernization
- Build invisible infrastructure for AI agent data pipelines
- Implement multi-region, multi-cloud data strategy for high availability
- Reduce KTLO from over 40% to under 10%

## What you need

- 12+ yrs of software development experience
- BS or MS in Computer Science or related field
- Distributed infrastructure and platform services background
- Cross-team, company-wide system migration leadership
- Operational excellence with metrics, alerts, and dashboards

## Job description

### **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**

In this role, you’d be joining the Big Data Infrastructure team. Our team builds and maintains the platforms that power data work across Stripe, managing three core layers:

-   Data Orchestration (Airflow)
-   Batch Compute (Spark, Celeborn)
-   Data Lake (Iceberg, Hive, S3, Azure Blob Storage)

We support over 2,000 engineers and 600+ internal teams, processing workloads that organically grow more than 30% year over year. Our infrastructure handles massive scale, managing over 800 PB of data, running 325,000 applications a day, and accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual spend, directly powering critical pipelines like inbound payments, network reconciliation, and capital underwriting.

### **What you’ll do**

As the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, you will guide a 40+ person engineering team to scale our foundational data systems. You will partner closely with major internal customers like Data Foundations, Payins Engineering, and AI/ML Foundations to modernize our tech stack and execute Stripe's transition to the "Agentic Era" - building "invisible infrastructure" where AI agents operate data pipelines end-to-end. 

### **Responsibilities**

-   Serve as the technical leader for the Big Data Infrastructure organization, overseeing distributed systems that manage 20% of Stripe's total AWS spend
-   Execute Stripe's transition to the "Agentic Era" by building invisible infrastructure that empowers AI agents to author, validate, ship, and operate data pipelines
-   Drive the architecture and delivery of critical modernization bets, including YARN to Kubernetes migrations, native vectorization (Gluten/Velox), and Airflow and Data Catalog modernization
-   Lead the implementation of a multi-region and multi-cloud data strategy for high availability, disaster recovery, and Azure Blob Storage compliance
-   Reduce operational burden and maintenance overhead (KTLO) from over 40% to under 10% by shifting fixes into the platform instead of relying on runbooks
-   Foster a culture of operational excellence and mentor engineers at various stages in their careers, up to Staff+

### **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**

-   BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field
-   This is a Senior Staff role, so ideally 12+ years of professional experience in a software development role
-   A strong engineering background in distributed infrastructure and/or platform services, including one or more of the following: storage, databases, or compute
-   Experience leading projects on a cross-team and company-wide scale, including scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime
-   Experience developing, maintaining, and debugging distributed systems while optimizing their reliability and security
-   Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards

### **Preferred qualifications**

-   Experience driving AI-led architectural transformations and integrating agentic workflows into large-scale data systems
-   Experience in a development team at AWS, Azure, OCI, or Google
-   Experience with big data infrastructure at scale, such as Spark, Iceberg, S3, Airflow, YARN, and Celeborn
-   Experience with database internals and/or with Kubernetes

## Other open roles at Stripe

- [Product/Design Recruiter](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-jobs/stripe/product-design-recruiter-8303870) — Chicago, Atlanta, US-Remote, Toro
- [Financial Services Transfer Pricing Strategist](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-jobs/stripe/financial-services-transfer-pricing-strategist-8318680) — New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco
- [Engineering Program Manager, Internal Systems](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-jobs/stripe/engineering-program-manager-internal-systems-8223113) — US locations
- [Security Engineer, Privy](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-jobs/stripe/security-engineer-privy-8306475) — NYC-Privy
- [Manager, Marketing Analytics](https://zerogtalent.com/frontier-jobs/stripe/manager-marketing-analytics-8335413) — Toronto, Chicago, Atlanta

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