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 The Merchant Experience team builds the UI operating system and core experiences that power decades of growth for millions of businesses globally, enabling Stripe to be the business SaaS solution of choice for next-gen companies. We own the foundational platforms and product surfaces that merchants interact with every day - from the Stripe Dashboard to the frameworks and tooling that hundreds of Stripe engineers use to build world-class user interfaces. We're at an inflection point. AI is fundamentally changing how users interact with software, and we believe Stripe is uniquely positioned to reimagine what a merchant experience looks like in an AI-native world. At the same time, we're raising the bar on the quality and performance of everything we ship - because the millions of businesses that depend on Stripe deserve an experience that is fast, reliable, and crafted with care. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Senior Staff Engineer on the Merchant Experience team, you'll be a technical leader across 50+ Engineers responsible for shaping the next generation of how Stripe merchants interact with our products. You'll drive a step-function improvement in the quality and performance of our core surfaces, and help define what AI-powered merchant experiences look like at Stripe. RESPONSIBILITIES * Define technical strategy for merchant-facing experiences across Stripe, with a focus on quality, performance, and the integration of AI into core user workflows * Lead the design and delivery of complex, cross-team projects that measurably improve the reliability, responsiveness, and polish of Stripe merchant surfaces * Champion a quality-first engineering culture - establish standards, tooling, and processes that make it easy to ship high-quality, performant UI by default * Drive performance as a product feature and own the technical approach to making the Dashboard and merchant tools best-in-class in speed and responsiveness, including instrumentation, budgets, and architectural improvements * Innovate on the future of merchant UX, explore and prototype how AI can transform the way merchants discover, configure, and operate Stripe products, moving beyond traditional dashboard paradigms * Build platforms and abstractions that make Stripe engineers more productive—frameworks, components, and developer tools that encode best practices for quality and performance * Partner across Stripe with Product, Design, AI and ML, and infrastructure teams to translate high-level product vision into a concrete technical roadmap * Mentor and grow engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar and fostering a culture of craftsmanship and high standards 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 * This is a Senior Staff role—the expected scope of this role includes overseeing the work of 4-6 teams and owning an entire portfolio of products—and while there's no strict minimum we're looking for, most candidates will have at least 10-15 years of experience in the industry * Experience building and shipping complex, user-facing web applications that have reached large-scale audiences (hundreds of thousands of users) or have been contributed to by hundreds of engineers * A track record of leading large-scale, cross-functional engineering projects with broad organizational impact * Deep expertise in modern frontend and full-stack development—you have strong opinions on what makes a great user experience and the technical skills to make it real * Demonstrated ability to drive measurable improvements in software quality and performance (e.g., load times, reliability, test coverage, error rates) * Experience influencing technical direction and driving alignment across multiple teams without formal authority * Excellent communication skills—you can articulate a compelling technical vision to engineers, product leaders, and executives alike PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS * Experience building or maintaining design systems, component libraries, or frontend platform infrastructure at scale—ideally with React * A deep interest in the intersection of AI and UX—you think critically about how emerging technologies change interaction models and are excited to pioneer new paradigms * Experience with performance engineering, including profiling, instrumentation, budgeting, and optimization of modern web applications * Experience with the complexities of deploying large web applications at global scale—bundling, CDNs, browser compatibility, and build tooling * Comfort working across the full stack—while this role skews frontend, you're not afraid to dive into APIs, backend services, or data layers when that's what the problem requires * Familiarity with distributed systems, API design, and building platforms that serve both internal developers and external users * A passion for developer experience and making other engineers more productive * Experience mentoring senior engineers and contributing to engineering culture and hiring * Hands-on experience integrating AI-powered capabilities into user-facing products—you've helped ship features that make complex workflows simpler and more intelligent