Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

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 Risk Engineering builds the systems that protect Stripe from fraud, credit losses, and regulatory risk across user onboarding, compliance, financial crimes, and identity verification. Financial Crimes Engineering builds the systems and controls that let Stripe safely onboard businesses in emerging and regulated industries while keeping Stripe in compliance with sanctions law, anti-money-laundering rules, and financial partner requirements. We keep known bad actors off Stripe, find new through ongoing detection, and build AI-augmented tooling that helps expert reviewers resolve cases quickly and accurately. We operate at scale, screening every user, enforcing jurisdictional restrictions across money movement in real time, and automating signal acquisition and synthesis into investigation workflows. We're now re-architecting our screening platform to make it safe and easy for new Stripe products to launch with the right financial crimes controls, to express richer policy as code, and to serve as a multi-tenant Risk Platform offering across Stripe's products and subsidiaries. What you'll do As a Staff Engineer on Financial Crimes Engineering, you'll own technical direction across our screening, detection, and review systems. You'll design infrastructure that balances screening latency with accuracy, build the systems that surface emerging risk and collect information to resolve it, and ensure investigators have the tooling they need. You'll work across distributed systems and policy logic, partnering with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate regulation into working software. Responsibilities • Define technical strategy & vision: Establish the multi-year architecture for Stripe’s real-time entity matching infrastructure, policy enforcement engines, and reviewer tooling • Architect high-scale systems: Design and optimize distributed screening engines and detection pipelines handling entity- and transaction-level requests at scale with strict SLA and uptime guarantees. • Build investigations infrastructure: Design the systems that surface suspicious activity, collect additional information from users, route cases to reviewers, and augment human judgment with AI to drive faster, more accurate case resolution. • Drive cross-functional technical alignment: Serve as the primary technical voice with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product leaders to translate evolving global regulatory requirements into technical ones. • Enable Risk as a Service: Lead the architectural evolution toward a multi-tenant screening platform - laying the technical foundation for both internal product launches and external developer-facing APIs. • Raise the engineering bar: Set standards for system design, API consistency, and operational rigor across backend and ML-adjacent systems; mentor senior engineers and lead high-stakes design reviews. • Ensure operational excellence: Own system reliability, observability, and latency, ensuring production systems adapt quickly to sudden changes in global sanctions lists or traffic spikes, and participate in an on-call rotation for these systems. 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 • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in a strategic technical leadership role on core infrastructure, distributed systems, or platform engineering. • Proven experience designing, building, and operating high-throughput, low-latency APIs and distributed backend systems at scale. • Track record of defining technical roadmaps and driving alignment across multiple engineering teams and cross-functional domains. • Hands-on technical depth - comfortable jumping from high-level system architecture down to code-level performance tuning and production debugging. • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a track record of articulating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders. Preferred qualifications • Domain experience in financial crimes, sanctions screening, AML (Anti-Money Laundering), entity resolution, or high-stakes trust & safety platforms. • Familiarity with applying LLMs or ML to operational workflows (e.g., case triage, entity resolution, review automation), or experience with fuzzy string matching and NLP for entity matching. • Experience building investigator/analyst tooling, case management systems, or human-in-the-loop review workflows. • Experience building platform products or APIs consumed by both internal engineering teams and external developers (e.g., API backward compatibility, client libraries). • Prior experience leading 0-1 platform builds or major architectural modernizations from concept to production. • Tech stack experience across multi-language environments (e.g., Primarily Ruby and Java) and modern data infrastructure • Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making high-judgment engineering calls in a fast-moving regulatory environment