Staff Software Engineer, Financial Crimes

About the role

You will define and drive the technical strategy for Stripe's real-time screening, detection, and review systems within Financial Crimes Engineering. You will own the architecture that balances screening latency with accuracy while ensuring investigators have the tooling needed to resolve cases quickly. You will design infrastructure that protects Stripe from fraud, credit losses, and regulatory risk across onboarding, compliance, and financial crimes workflows. You will partner closely with ML, Legal, and Compliance to translate evolving global regulations into robust, working software. You will establish multi-year direction for entity matching, policy enforcement engines, and reviewer tooling across distributed systems. You will enable Risk as a Service by laying the technical foundation for multi-tenant offerings and external developer-facing APIs. You will mentor senior engineers and lead high-stakes design reviews to raise the engineering bar across backend and ML-adjacent systems.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define technical strategy and multi-year architecture for Stripe's real-time entity matching infrastructure, policy enforcement engines, and reviewer tooling.
• Architect and optimize distributed screening engines and detection pipelines to handle entity- and transaction-level requests at scale with strict SLA and uptime guarantees.
• Build investigations infrastructure that surfaces suspicious activity, collects additional information from users, routes cases to reviewers, and augments human judgment with AI to drive faster, more accurate case resolution.
• Drive cross-functional technical alignment by serving as the primary technical voice with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product leaders to translate evolving global regulatory requirements into technical ones.
• Lead the architectural evolution toward a multi-tenant screening platform, laying the foundation for both internal product launches and external developer-facing APIs as Risk as a Service.
• Set and enforce standards for system design, API consistency, and operational rigor across backend and ML-adjacent systems while mentoring senior engineers and leading high-stakes design reviews.
• 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.
• Partner with ML teams to integrate model outputs into screening and detection workflows, ensuring that AI-augmented tooling improves accuracy and throughput for investigators.
• Collaborate with Product and Compliance to define policy as code approaches that allow new Stripe products to launch with the right financial crimes controls from day one.
• Design data models and APIs that enable richer policy expressions while maintaining performance and scalability across Stripe's global traffic.
• Implement observability and alerting for screening and detection pipelines to surface anomalies, performance regressions, and compliance deviations in real time.
• Contribute to incident response for production issues related to screening, false positives, or regulatory concerns, driving post-incident improvements.

Requirements

You must meet these stated requirements to be considered for the role.

• 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 and operating high-scale distributed systems that handle large volumes of transactions and entities in real time.
• Deep understanding of infrastructure for screening, matching, and rule-based or policy-based enforcement in regulated environments.
• Experience working with or building systems that ingest, process, and act upon global sanctions lists, watchlists, and regulatory updates.
• Strong background in designing APIs and systems that balance strict compliance requirements with developer experience and product velocity.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives with Legal, Compliance, ML, and Product teams in a regulated domain.
• Experience with AI-augmented or machine-learning-enhanced investigation workflows is valued in the context of financial crimes tooling.
• Comfort operating in environments with evolving regulations and the need to rapidly translate regulation into software controls.

Nice to have

Preferred qualifications that would strengthen your candidacy but are not required.

• Experience contributing to open source projects or building internal tools that are used by multiple teams.
• Background in fintech, payments, or financial infrastructure in regulated markets.

Practical notes

This role is based in Toronto. The engagement is full-time. You must be able to work in this location to be considered. No additional details on compensation are provided in this source material.