Engineering Manager of Managers, Database

Job Description

Stripe’s infrastructure powers businesses all over the world. We process payments, run marketplaces, detect fraud, help entrepreneurs start an internet business from anywhere in the world, build world-class developer-friendly APIs, and more. Every request we process is very important to everyone involved and Stripe’s availability and reliability are critical because our users’ businesses depend on us.

Our Online Database organization provides the core database infrastructure that’s at the heart of all real-time critical payment requests to the Stripe API. We architect, build, maintain, and operate the underlying database infrastructure that enables six 9s (that’s right, 6) of availability for all critical Stripe payment APIs.

Our system is the record of truth for nearly all of Stripe’s online data. It must meet the highest levels of security, availability, consistency, performance, and durability in the face of our ever-increasing growth.

We are continually thinking about ways to evolve our infrastructure to support Stripe’s growing needs to build the best-in-class distributed database platform – including ways to work around the CAP theorem!

We provide a product portfolio of key-value, relational, caching, and distributed consensus offerings.

We are looking for a leader to own one of our core databases here at Stripe. If you are someone who finds solving complex distributed systems challenges just as exciting as hiring and mentoring a quickly growing organization then this role is for you.

You will:

• Be directly responsible for defining and implementing the database strategy that will power Stripe for the next five years
• Work with engineers and other leaders to improve our database platform, primarily in the areas of availability, performance, and security
• Support the engineering team in achieving a high level of technical quality, reliability, and developer satisfaction
• Manage processes to help the team do its best work and engage effectively with the rest of Stripe
• Recruit great engineers and managers in collaboration with Stripe’s recruiting team.
• Mentor and coach managers to create healthy and well-executing teams
• Develop engineers on the team, enabling them to advance in their careers
• Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Managed teams that have shipped and operated large scale, highly available distributed systems, with database experience (MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, etcd, zookeeper) a plus
• Extreme customer focus, committed to investing in partnerships with other Stripe engineers to establish empathy and understand their use-cases
• A genuine enjoyment of learning and diving into the nuts-and-bolts of how things work, with the ability to question and direct architectural decisions
• The ability to work well cross-functionally, and the ability to think rigorously and make hard decisions and tradeoffs
• A strong quantitative and analytical background
• The ability to thrive on a high level of autonomy and responsibility
• The desire to encourage a healthy, inclusive work environment that’s both supportive and challenging
• Successfully recruited and built great teams
• Experience managing teams of 50+ engineers

What’s it like to work at Stripe?

Stripe is helping the internet fulfill its potential as a platform for economic progress by building software tools that accelerate global economic access and technological development. Stripe makes it easy to start, run and scale an internet business from anywhere in the world.

Stripe is, at its heart, an engineering company. To provide a missing pillar of core internet infrastructure, we hire people with a broad set of technical skills (and from a wide variety of backgrounds) who are ready to take on some of the most challenging problems in the industry – from reliably handling 100M API requests per day, to building adaptive machine learning as a result of years of data science and infrastructure work, and enabling entrepreneurs worldwide to start a global internet business.

We look at Stripe as a constant work in progress and the same is true of our people; for all of us, we believe the best is yet to come. We’re here to support each other in our curiosity and creativity – which we pursue through thoughtful discussion and knowledge-sharing among a diverse set of peers and colleagues.

We encourage all engineers to transition teams once every year and a half and also take on short-term projects with other teams across Stripe. This enables engineers to learn how different parts of Stripe work while also establishing stronger ties and cross-pollination between groups.

We contribute to existing open-source projects and the people working on them, and we release several tools as open-source.

We want to work in a company of warm, inclusive people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. The kind of people who are committed to going out of their way to help other Stripes in the short-term and pushing them to improve over the long-term (by helping them to get better at what they do).

We’re a highly cross-functional organization and view that as part of the fun: we design our space to encourage as much collaboration as possible. We have long tables in the kitchen for a reason (to enable everyone to meet new people and learn from them). We also have a culture of transparency that we carry through to email communication, ensuring that Stripes all around the world have the information they need to make good local decisions.

In both our products and our people, we aim to reflect, represent and advocate for all of our users, globally. Our users transcend geography, culture and language; what we share, collectively, is a drive to create a fairer, more economically interconnected world.