Staff Engineer, Compute Foundation
Sydney · Australia Locations · 10+ years experience · Posted Oct 6, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 10+ years experience
- Location
- Sydney · Australia Locations
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 role
- The Compute Foundation group builds and operates core systems that enable every Stripe engineer to ship code, configuration, and infrastructure changes safely and at high velocity.
- Embedded on the Imaging team, you will design, build, and distribute Linux machine images while overseeing OS packages, security-patching infrastructure, and host bootstrapping systems.
Responsibilities
- Lead large, ambiguous infrastructure projects from initial design through production launch, broad adoption, and long-term operation.
- Set technical direction for the evolution of Stripe’s host infrastructure, including how machine images are built, validated, distributed, and operated.
- Design systems and practices that make broad infrastructure changes safe and predictable by establishing strong validation, staged rollout, observability, and rollback capabilities.
- Lead incident response for the systems the team owns and systematically reduce operational toil.
- Partner with technical leaders across infrastructure, security, compliance, and service teams to represent the Imaging team’s perspective and align on shared technical direction.
- Lead critical design reviews and establish standards for the safety, reliability, operability, and usability of Stripe’s host infrastructure.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of designing and shipping production infrastructure systems of significant scale and complexity.
- Proven ability to lead large, ambiguous infrastructure projects end-to-end - from technical design through delivery - including managing cross-team dependencies and coordinating migrations across many consuming teams.
- Deep expertise in Linux systems, including boot and initialization, systems, processes, networking, filesystems, storage, packages, and production debugging.
- Strong foundations in cloud compute infrastructure, including machine images, virtual machines, autoscaling fleets, launch configuration, block storage, IAM, health evaluation, and multi-region operation in AWS, Azure, or an equivalent environment.
- Experience designing or operating fleet-scale image, host-management, configuration-management, or infrastructure-provisioning systems.
- Experience with safe infrastructure rollout practices, including automated validation, canarying, progressive rollout, health evaluation, rollback, and blast-radius containment.
- Strong background in service reliability and operational excellence: demonstrated ability to lead incident response, reduce toil, and build systems that are reliable, debuggable, and maintainable by a team.
- Track record of broad technical impact across multiple large systems: fluency across a complex codebase, force-multiplier effect through code review and mentorship, and the ability to set technical direction for a team rather than just execute within it.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience building modern image-based, immutable, or declarative infrastructure platforms.
- Expertise with containers, Kubernetes, and migrating VM-based workloads to managed platforms
- Experience operating large-scale Linux fleets across AWS, Azure, or multiple regions.
- Familiarity with progressive delivery, automated validation, fleet health signals, and rollback systems.
- Experience modernizing legacy configuration-management or host-provisioning systems.
- Knowledge of OS security patching, software supply-chain security, and artifact provenance.
- Strong developer-platform instincts, with experience building safe abstractions and self-service workflows.
Skills
- Linux
- AWS
- Azure
- Kubernetes
- Containers
- Systemd
