Our customers are the most ambitious organizations in the world. Previously, they had to create an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden version of financial rails before they could do business online. We are doing the difficult-but-necessary work of building a global payments and treasury network—so entrepreneurs and enterprises can concentrate on creating value, not moving money.
We operate at significant scale, but we’re still tiny relative to the opportunity. 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.
What matters to us is what we enable for others
We focus on the details of everything we do. All to help businesses around the world focus on what’s most important to them. So Lyft can concentrate on delighting drivers and riders, rather than moving money between them. So Slack can reinvent workplace communication, not invoicing. So Khan Academy can focus on educating the world, not fighting credit card fraud. We take pride in freeing up others to work in the spotlight by solving complex infrastructure problems that would otherwise hold them back.
Help us build economic infrastructure for the internet.
The challenges we’re up against
Our customers entrust us with the enormous responsibility of helping to run their livelihoods. We work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust. Here’s a partial list of things that keep us up at night.
We are bandwidth-constrained
Our business has grown much faster than our company. When we do planning and prioritization, the projects that end up “below the line”—dropped from near-term plans because of lack of people to staff them—would be exciting, high-impact things to work on. But we maintain an extremely high bar for the quality of what we create and how we interact, and we aren’t prepared to sacrifice that for quantity of output.
Our growth depends on our users’ growth
Merely outrunning our competitors would be insufficient—we have to outrun all our customers. We have to get to the regions they want to expand to before they do. We have to support modes of commerce that don’t yet exist because they are still busy inventing them. We have to remain a step ahead of the millions of organizations that use Stripe every day so we help them scale and succeed.
We don’t have all the answers
The problems we’re most excited to solve are far beyond our current areas of expertise, which is motivating to us. It enables incredible growth for people joining Stripe. We are willing to give enormous responsibilities to Stripes at any stage of their career if they demonstrate the right abilities to run with them. We have expanded into new countries with a ground team of two people. We have company-defining products that were originally built by one or two engineers in their first real job (or internship).
We’re building for the long term
We have to work at the speed of the internet, while also being among the most reliable organizations on it. We need to invent a mode of working which marries the intensity that startups often prize with sustainable careers and organizational memory. We want the uptime for Stripe to be measured in decades; we cannot afford to burn our archives every 18 months due to turnover.
The right people don’t always think they’re right
Successful Stripes are rigorous thinkers who appreciate that things worth doing are rarely simple. We want people who are unafraid to be wrong, to enthusiastically back proposals they initially opposed, and to support decisions with numbers and narrative. We operate in situations of substantial uncertainty and cannot afford either timidity or recklessness.
The global financial system can seem like a mystifying domain. It is not. It is composed of people and computers, just like many other systems you’ve worked on. Most Stripes don’t have a background in finance, and they’ve thrived because of their fresh perspectives. We want generalists capable of parachuting anywhere into our operations, learning about a field they have never touched before, and executing competently in areas far outside their formal remit.
We want specialists who are already experts in their chosen field and are ready to spend several years advancing the state of the art in it. We know that we cannot be successful without an environment which enthusiastically supports both over the long arcs of their careers.
People who thrive in high-conflict work environments often do not enjoy the experience here. We try to embrace extreme interpersonal kindness while still encouraging Stripes to take measured risks and act boldly, even in the absence of consensus. We hope that you will strike a balance: unafraid to say what needs saying, but encouraging of others while saying it.
Developing a global mindset
Stripe has its roots on the internet, but our office in San Francisco has been the beating heart of our operations for most of our history. We think this is unlikely to remain true. The future of global commerce is going to be increasingly weighted outside the existing centers of technology and finance.
Where we are
More than 4,000 Stripes build products and support our users from offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Seattle, Amsterdam, Bangalore, Berlin, Dublin, London, Paris, Melbourne, Singapore, Mexico City, and Tokyo—as well as the homes and coworking spaces of our remote colleagues.
Where we need to be
To make geography on the internet less relevant, we need to be working around the world. We can’t build what our customers need without sharing cabs with them in Singapore or buying food together in the darshinis of Bangalore. We need to speak to them in a language they understand—literally and metaphorically. (Stripes across our offices speak over thirty languages. One could reasonably hear five just walking to lunch.) All of this is imperative as we advance the support of local payments used for every experience.
Where we’re improving
We have made some major strides, but the work ahead of us will not be easy. We have teams that span four continents. We need new organizational muscles for apportioning work globally while keeping our ears to the ground locally. All of our users should be surprised to learn that Stripe was not started in their hometown. We have a long way to go.
We survey Stripes twice per year to improve the way we work as a company and as individuals.
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Effectively navigating and sharing information
I understand how decisions are made at Stripe, and significant changes are communicated well.
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Feedback
I receive constructive feedback from my peers.
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Belief in Stripe
I believe in the future and mission of the company.
- Favorable
- Neutral
- Negative
Support to do your best work
We offer competitive and comprehensive benefits, though lots of companies can offer you those. We also have a rarer opportunity: The impact you can make from being at a nimble startup, working on a platform that operates at a significant (and quickly growing) scale.
Training and mentorship
When you start at Stripe, you go through two weeks of in-depth onboarding. We will pair you with experienced team members to show you the ropes. And then you learn by doing. It is common for Stripes to work on things outside their domain of expertise, so we encourage people to regularly attend hands-on classes led by internal and external experts on everything from
Heterogeneous perspectives
Stripes come from all sorts of backgrounds with experience in engineering, design, operations, consulting, government, finance, healthcare, education, and even forensic anthropology. We strive for humility, as individuals and as an organization. We know that we can be great at doing something alone, but it will be even better when accomplished together. We are also extremely transparent internally. If you are curious about engineering, running startups, corporate strategy, or the global economy, you’ll have experts to learn from. And they’re eager to learn from you.
Ownership and impact
Stripe has sprawling aspirations, but our actual work is mostly done in small teams. There is no magic to working with banking partners in Japan, moving billions of dollars around the world, or pushing the limits of browser animations on our product pages. We have smart people who sweat the details—who start with a blank screen, work until it is ready, and then polish until it is exceptional. You will be able to point to specific, high-impact things that did not exist in the world until you put them there.
We want to talk to you
We will hire hundreds of people who read these words. We cannot possibly succeed in our goals without doing so. We would be thrilled if you had questions about opportunities or just wanted to chat to explore options. Do not worry too much about picking exactly the right one; we can always give you more options after starting the conversation.
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